Epistemographer

No time for a long post now, but I was just deciding which folder into which to sort a particular e-mail, and realized that the system of categorized folders I’d been using for the better part of a decade doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore. This actually seems to fit with a trend I’ve been noticing, a fundamental shift going on in information technology between filing (the spatial organization of information into discrete containers) and tagging (the labeling of discrete pieces of information with metadata). It seems like all the hot new tools (Gmail, wikipedia, del.icio.us, Spotlight, etc.) work with tags, and require a different way of conceptualizing information that, at its core, is fundamentally non-spatial. This strikes me as a big deal, one worth mulling over…