Tagging is arbitrary?

The result of this tagging is two-fold. First of all, it means web-users can elect to follow trails of tags which lead them to similarly tagged items. Similarly tagged items thus coagulate into groups. These groups are paradoxically both arbitrary and organised. Tagging, is, in most cases gloriously arbitrary. The choice of which tag/s to assign an item is left to the user to decide, and having done so the tag will betray neither user ignorance nor insight. For example, clicking on a tag in del.icio.us called identity will retrieve bookmarks other people have classified as identity. The most common context of identity by del.icio.us users is Personal Digital Identity. Clicking on the identity tag in del.icio.us in the hope to find bookmarks of the philosophical context of identity will require some scrolling down the page to locate a match. The identity tag is hence undifferianted. A bookmark tagged identity (context PDI) will appear on the same scrollable list as those tagged identity (context missing persons). Tag names are arbitrary. Retrieval is organised.

Whilst tagging may be arbitrary, it is certainly neither artificial nor contrived. We are organising our own information, using own own descriptors. In that sense it is very real: reflecting what matters to us. Classification is unmediated, and bottom-up... not top-down. So, collectively tagging represents our online world, as we see it.

[tag: community]