Folksonomy - The Official Term For Personalized Hashtagging
You’re probably wondering what the hell folksonomy is. Trust me, I didn’t realize the term even existed until this class. As I typed the word in, tumblr asked me if I actually meant folksiness. But no. I meant what I wrote and I’m about to elaborate on it.
You know the tiny little tags you use on tumblr, twitter and such? The labels you put on your posts to help others identify it? That’s folksonomy. A classification of what you’re thinking, writing and posting. All summed up into a few little words.
I’m participating in folksonomy in this post too. The number of hashtags is me classifying this post with whatever I deem necessary. Heck, I can make it as personal as I want. But I find that quite often I don’t care that much.
It’s interesting to realize what a world we live in where personalized tagging has such a professional name. Folksonomy. It’s definitely not something you hear every day. In fact, you’re probably doing it and not even realizing. I can’t count the number of time I’ve done some tagging and it’s been personal to myself.
Especially on tumblr where the tags can be incredibly descriptive to the point where no one will ever be able to find it but you. And, interestingly enough, something that tumblr does unlike any other post is that it hides the tags to show the comments and the post. You want to see what I’m tagging? You better click to find out.
We LIVE in a folksonomy. Or to better put it, our society IS a folksonomy. We tag everything with some sort of label. We personalize things in our everyday lives to classify them and make it easier for us to go around. It’s a little thing we do to make ourselves stand out in a monochromatic world where everything is done in one way and it isn’t your way.
We are a folksonomy. It is as simple as that.
“A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate.”
~ Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant