i was looking at all the content in del.icio.us tagged “immigration” and this is what i found:
whoops. let me blow it up and show you the related tags…
what should i make of this?
for the past year i’ve been working on an ethnography of social classification project. this has been mainly a pilot study of what it is that people actually do when they are adding things into sites like del.icio.us, flickr, etc. there’s been some early research (thx gleemie!) so far that begins to really incorporate ideas of social connection and social relations in digital social classification, rather than simply assuming that it happens like magic. as i’ve been plowing through my data, i’ve starting thinking about the ways in which these systems represent acts of collecting, rather than classifying. after looking around it seems like the tags that people really use are pretty arbitrary. there’s been so much focus and analysis on the tags themselves, that the research so far has been pretty limited at getting at what it is that people are actually doing. collecting seems to be a good way to think about this…at least that’s what i’m thinking so far.
as i’ve been chewing on this idea, i’s got thinking. there’s something about collecting that gives us a sense of who we are. there’s something about amassing things over time and then looking back on them that allows us to understand our historical trajectory. there’s something about collecting that gives us some kind of home in time, that allows us to place ourselves in the stretch of years past. how can i begin to think about acts of collecting in relation to space and time? it seems that people collect and it can either operate as a window into some unknown other , like with curio cabinets. but in collection personal artefacts, there’s something about memorializing ourselves, and imbuing objects with this kind of role of memorialization. think photos. think yearbooks. think that rock you picked up on the coast during the summer trip to rosarito. perhaps memorialization isn’t the right word as it makes it seem too much stuffy and official, but there’s definitely something in the act of collecting that is about ordering in time and constructing space, some kind of domestic space. some kind of personal space. but also some kind of shared space too.
so a lot of these little things that we toss into our digital filing cabinet, these so-called tagging systems, they’re like digital scraps. digital news clippings. digital ephemera of sorts. i think researchers have made a mistake so far by looking at the terms of organization, the tags. i think the real story is about how people relate to their digital scraps. i think there is a really kind of under the radar, seemingly quiet-boring tension here that we haven’t really explored yet.
i have been doggedly reading through such a myriad of texts these days. there’s something to be said about waking up at 10:30am, making a cup of tea, and slowly plodding through a big stack of books without imminent pressure on time. it’s all quite luxurious. UCLA is on a quarter system and a 11 week term is ridiculously hectic. it feels like mental and logistical sprinting for 9 months straight and so i’m more than happy to take things quietly right now before i fully ramp up again in september. i’ve been going out (gasp) and hanging with family and friends more than my workaholic usualness. oh yeah, i also pimped out my bike and have been seriously tooling around LA on my bike which has been so mega-awesome. LA isn’t the most bike friendly place and so find myself duking it out with pedestrians for sidewalk real estate, but needless to say, i can understand now why dogs stick their heads out of car windows. i also learned that i still know how to pop a wheelie and bike with no hands. so ha.
a lot of my reading so far have meandered quite a bit. i started out thinking i was going to bone up on all the po-mo lit, but that has since evolved into information theory, literary criticism, and STS work in classification. the main point of all this has been to try and think about various metaphors to describe tagging systems. understanding my own information flux i was really intrigued with notions of noise to describe the ongoing and circuitous flow of information in my daily life and weirdly enough i just came across a posting from alice marwick that expresses those same sentiments. when looking at tagging more specifically, i was always struck by just how noisy these systems were. i mean, it’s like a big “miscellaneous” heap as David Weinberger would say. alice takes on this is a rather optimistic spin on the medium is the message, or rather that flux and noise are the message.
i’m a bit more ambivalent about this. i don’t think it’s necessarily about being a good or bad thing. instead, i think that this is a shift in how we look out and into the world, which in turn shapes how we sense and construct ourselves. when i think about tagging in relation to information infrastructures, tagging systems (including the ways in which we opt to describe ourselves social networking sites because they are essentially discrete terms in some simplistic “this is who i am” schema”) seem to operate like some kind of informational exoskeleton that braces our digital selves. and so rather than supporting from within, much like a brace, these systems awkwardly and uncomfortably hold things together from the outside. the inherent chaos that comes from flux-driven noise lends itself to this kind of awkward piecing together.
i certainly believe that there is an inherent beauty to chaos and noise, after all most innovation, creativity, and imagination have their origins in the previously unknown and unconnected. however i think there are some serious implications for how we manage the noise and thus the meaning of the noise. if noise and flux are meaningful purely within their own terms, this kind of self-referentiality is kind of depressing.
anyhow, an update for fall: i will be presenting at 4S in Montreal and then schlepping off to Vanouver for AOIR. all this is gonna happen within a week of each other. yipes! i’m hosting a panel, with my friend katie shilton at 4S titled “Technologies of Forgetting and Exclusion: Case Studies in the Social Benefits of Forgetting” where i’ll be talking more specifically about the information tracking of sexual offenders, which if you haven’t been following, is a rather egregious example of the problems of this whole “right to know” attitude in our age of digital data capture and surveillance.
okay. need to go to bed. smell ya later.
as i have been slowly gearing up for my summer writing projects, i’ve been trying to wrap my head around several things. first, i had previously briefly posted about the notion of information use to begin taking a closer look at the the things that people do in relation to the ways we make meaning of our lives. how we perceive the world is often informed by how we come to know the world. so in a digital-mediated-informational world, how has this altered how we exeperience and make meaning in our day to day lives?
i’ve been busy this academic year brushing up on the old social theory literature, which can really inform these questions. one primary question in this area has got a lot of do with exploring the relationships between structures and our ability to act independently (or not) of them. stuctures entails a wide variety of things, including: cultures, institutions, hardware, economics, language, government. unfortunately, what constitutes a social structure is ofen ill defined, but it’s often posited as a curtailing force on our ability to act independently, as freely thinking agents.
while that as a rather crude overview of social theory, i’ve been reading social theory in this lens in attempts to really get at that first question about how we make meaning in our lives. if we live in a network society now, how has our day to day and experiences in the world changed since industrial life, for example? clearly not easy questions and not easy answers. so, i’m kind of at a weird point in terms of summer projects where i feel like i have to choose between navigating down a information use path or an information structures path. what’s difficult is that i strongly feel that given developments in 2-point-duh applications, there is this kind of convergence between use-and-structures; a kind of explicit rendering and embedding between the two where use constitutes structures. structures have always constituted use, but it’s this second iteration that brings it all back together and makes it so fascinating. this relates to some of my earliers posts on the collapse of production and consumption in tagging and remix more largely, where acts of remixing or tagging actually are simultaneous instances of producing and consuming information.
anyhow, i will have to make a decision at some point and decide on what direction i need to go as it will require steeping my nose in books for the summer…that is, in between barbequing, reading fiction, travelling, napping, and being lazy. 
Filed under: tagging
so i am writing my last paper for the quarter on tagging and have been going through the previous research and literature and have been struck by the lack of qualitative approaches so far. i suppose given the recent growth and development of tagging, that shouldn’t be too surprising, but so far i have only seen one individual, adam mathes, argue for the need altogether.
it’s been interesting so see how most research on tagging to date has focused primarily on analysing the tags themselves, doing text-term analysis and trying to deduce actions, incentives, motivations by reading or tabulating the terms and more often than not they’ve maintained an explicit or implicit information retrieval framework, implying that the only reason why people engage in tags is to find things later. but it seems to me that there needs to be a reconceptualization of tagging towards an emphasis on use and context as there are some really interesting questions about the *social* dynamics at play in tagging. so far there has been little examination of the ways in which tagging, while an individual act, a lot of the meaninfulnes of tagging is *socially* constituted. alla zollers, a friend of mine here at ucla, has done a really nice exploratory piece on tagging and expressions, performance, and activism.
i still think that qualitative orientations should be emphasised in terms of trying to delve into the level of experience of tagging and i particularly like the frameworks of information use in framing tagging and brenda dervin’s sense-making theory is especially compelling right now, particularly with the strong social constructivist bent that emphasizes use and context in shaping how people engage with information seeking, creating, and processing. in my opinion, tagging represents a convergence of seeking, retrieval, creating, and processing all in one motion. unfortunately, the discipline of LIS has kept these rather separate. clearly, tagging represents a lot of challenges to the traditional cleavages in LIS but it gives us a great opportunity to reflect upon the traditional models we’ve been using and as some who isn’t “native” to the field (I don’t know anyone who is though nowadays) it’s really exciting to begin thinking about shapeshifting and redrawing these boundaries.
I tag. Voraciously. I visit my del.icio.us account several times a day and it’s starting to get to the point, where I turn to my del.icio.us account more so than google when I am searching for things. As I have started to think about tagging more, I’ve become struck by several characteristics of the acts of tagging itself.
From a general view, I have a sinking suspicion that a lot of the discourse surrounding “information” is devoid of any kind of political economy framework, i.e a consideration of the processes of consumption and production and the power dynamics at play. Don’t get me wrong, there are people who are considering these processes in related avenues, but they typically situate themselves in the media or new media discourse. That being said, it seems that tagging represents a new kind of collapse between consumption and production. While I don’t think this view is entirely original…I think a lot of the rhetoric surrounding “user-generated content” more generally is based on the view of enabling users of content to now be producers of content. What I think is particularly interesting in tagging is the simultaneity of consumption and production; that in the single act of tagging you are simultaneously consuming information and producing information. Metaphors of re-mix abound in these discussions, but it’s important to note that re-mix, from a music point of view, still kept the distinctions between consumption and production in tact.
I think part of this collapse simultaneity then is related to the purely symbolic domain of tagging, as it stands currently. Tagging so far has been implemented solely in the digital space, with reference solely to digital materials.
From a network perspective, tagging starts with the self and the ego, generating social benefits and collective knowledge in a kind of accidental-externalistic fashion, rather than from a purely altruistic one. This recent blog post on the differences between tagging in amazon and librarything discuss the importance of tagging of your own use rather than tagging for everyone else. So, as an extension of the ego network, tagging begins to operate like some kind of symbolic free market, but with consumers and producers coupled as one.
