IBU News (Germany) Edition 0.9.9

A critique of social tagging and Web 2.0 semiology

These days there is hardly a "Web 2.0" application that does not feature "tags" and does not display (somewhere) a variation of "tag cloud" visualizations.

"It is a saying among Divines, that Hell is full of good Intentions, and Meanings.
— R. Whitlock (1654)

Social tagging sets out to recast the whole "problem" of information discovery, search and retrieval into visibility driven not by relevance (whatever that may mean) but social network. Social tagging is not just a special form of meta-information but a strategic game. On the one hand it claims to allow a complete and fully conscious unstructured "cooperative" means to attach well intentioned extra-corporal meaning and their implicit social interconnections to information (including also non-textual multimedia objects) but its also in many ways a voting system. Those that tag by using common words set out to influence its visibility and potential influence. This is not a product of some systematic disruptive behavior— and I'll exclude for now a consideration of spamming or other exploits (which are not necessarily part of the system)— or aboration but precisely the function of tags: associating the commonality of the use of tags with a relevance of those objects so tagged. The rest are disassociated and effectively excluded. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public to see less of the whole and be driven to a few more concentrated contributions chosen by "public opinion". What remains and discovered via the sphere of tags is de-contextualized and re-purposed.

The paradigm of Internet search needs to be re-cast as one of information discovery, search and retrieval of information dialogs rather than specific documents.

The imperative

The internet makes censorship really work since it can become transparent as air. No need to burn books when there are none. All you have to do is see to it that the books are invisible. While technically, unless it blocked explicitly (and in many parts of the world technology is coming into place to block content while in other countries just being caught with the intent to post content that has not "approved" one can and will land in prison or worse), technically something might be accessible BUT if one does not know where it is--- if its not visible--- it does not exist. At the same time there are many people that "see too much": too much violence, pornography and other content they see unsuitable to themselves and/or their children. The technology to "block" these pages is the same as those used to block page that people want to see but that their governments don't want them to. Its all about visibility. This is Internet Metaphysics 2008 (and has been the case for some years now) and part of the Raison d'être of the new paradigm: Change the visibility.