Epistemographer

Bridging S&TS and Communication Studies: Scholarship on Media and Information Technologies
Pablo Boczskowski and Leah Lievrouw

Like many out in the online world, I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging lately. I’m totally on board with the whole folksonomy/user-defined taxonomy/emergent order/Wisdom of Crowds thing, and totally convinced that statistically aggregating the individual choices of a large pool of individual actors is an unbelievably valuable way to structure and move through massive heaps of data.

Here’s the thing, though: I noticed that tags were introduced on DailyKos earlier this week, and something struck me as kinda hinky. In short, Kos was encouraging the community to not only tag their own articles, but to tag each others’ posts with whatever keywords seem relevant.

The tricky thing here is the intent behind the tagging: on DailyKos, people are choosing tags not for themselves, but for their fellow community members. They’re essentially embarking on a hugely utopian vision of collective classification, which is all well and good but for one thing – it entirely misses the boat on why tagging in the Flickr/del.icio.us sense actually works.

Earlier this year at SXSW, I picked up a phrase that I’ve been horribly overusing: “leveraging solipsism.” The whole point of the phrase is to indicate that there are things that we do for ourselves, and the choices that we make when doing things solely to benefit ourselves might in fact be useful when aggregated with all the choices made by other users. This is how Amazon recommendations work (we buy books for ourselves, and a statistical analysis of other purchases by people who bought the same books as us results in a list of books that we in all likelihood will also like). This is how Google works (everybody links to sites they like, so the most-linked-to sites much be the most useful). This is how del.icio.us works (I use tags to organize my own bookmarks, and when I click on a tag I can all the bookmarks that everyone thinks relate to the same topic). All is good.

The take-home point of The Wisdom of Crowds is that this structure underlies some of our core social institutions. The stock market, for example, is essentially a mechanism for aggregating the individual self-serving choices of millions of investors, usually settling on a pretty good approximation of a company’s true worth. However, Surowiecki notes, the wisdom of crowds starts to change when the crowd is self-conscious about its actions.

Think about it this way – if you’re tagging web bookmarks for your own organization, you’re going to use certain keywords. Now, think about how you might tag those bookmarks (or whether you’ll necessarily tag some of them at all) if you know that they’ll be made public, and your goal is less to make your own life easier and more to help others find sites. The two cases are by no means the same – the change in intention actually changes the words you might choose. With others in mind, your choices might be less idiosyncratic and personal, and your own initiative to find the best tags might lessen over time (because personal gain is a heck of an incentive, and helping others). Even worse, you might find yourself gaming the system – if you really like a particular page (or, if it’s your own), you might tag it with tangentially or entirely unrelated keywords to drive traffic (it costs virtually nothing to do so, and might have very tangible benefits). This is the battle that Google fights every day, because some users are aware of the aggregation system in place and have created server farms to exploit it.

What am I getting at here? I’m not sure yet, except to say the DailyKos thing is indicative of a broader trend. People (particularly early adopters) are starting to get the idea that tagging is Important, and in their zeal to implement it in some cases they’re missing out on a subtle point that is crucial to the success of tagging at all: it works best (and might truly only work at all) when you’re not thinking about the end uses of the tags at all. Kind of like Douglas Adams’ riff on flying: for it to work right, you’ve got to forget that you’re falling and essentially miss the ground.

So, as mentioned earlier, my friend Kevin has spent the summer flogging his book all across the USA. At his readings, he’s been asking people a single question: “What book changed your life?” Now, his publisher’s gotten into the act, inviting readers to describe their favorite book recommendations, and offering the chance to win 15 books, each recommended by one of the contributors to Bookmark Now.

Interested? Click here for the contest…