Social Consequences of Social Tagging
Elizabeth Lane Lawley,
Corante,
Jan 20, 2005
Some of the doubts I've expressed about things like Technorati Tags surface here in thsi article questioning social tagging in general. For example: "It’s certain that some people will try to game the system, deliberately tagging their photos to misdirect people." One possible solution? "A system by which people can form epistomology gangs who decide to share tags, and declare a concensually [sic] decided-upon meaning." The author presents readers with the ESP game, covered in these pages last May. It turns out that social tagging, in this context, isn't all it was made out to be. There isn't room to explain this, but: the product of a collaborative network is not the same as a product of each of the individual members. Collecting evryone's tags doesn't produce an Ubertag, it produces something that is not a tag and should not be used as a tag. Collective phenomena are emergent, not compositional. If you want a taxonomy to emerge from a collective process, you have to look at something else being done by the members of the group. What? Ah, that is the problem of Network Semantics.
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