The Electronic Village workshops have blown my mind. I am barely able to catch up with one of the workshops that I fall behind in another; amazing amount of information flowing in my direction and me unable to decide what to read/watch/listen to first (blog/video.podcast input)…not to talk about how to organize and store all those fantastic links and pages.
Fortunately, on our week on tagging and RSS, I had the chance to watch a video where two experts debate about the usefulness of the web 2.0. The debate and the information were really intense and I think I’ll go back more than once to watch parts of it again, but the thing that really hit home with me was the fact that digital information does not have the limitations that physical information has. When we go find a book in the library, the book can be in one place but not in another, since physical objects cannot be in two places at the same time. So if for example I want to find a book about cycling around Europe, the book might be in two places: tourism, OR cycling, or even in the Europe section. One, but not the three of them. The book will be on one shelf, and not in another. Simple, huh? Now if I want to find a blog about cycling around Europe, ANY of those 3 keywords, tourism, Europe AND cycling can help me find it. Just because I have “tagged” the blog with one keyword and people can find it googling one word, it doesn’t mean I can’t tag it using other terms that relate to it. When I thought about that, all made sense: Google Reader made sense, my blog made sense, how to organize all the material was clear now: tagging! Tagging is the key!!
Another revolutionary aspect of tagging is that information starts being organized in a different manner, a more personalized manner, which defies previous notions about who has the authority to decide how we organize the world around us. Some people might feel uncomfortable with this great amount of power that is being given to each individual at home in front of their computers; I think the greatest challenge is to educate the future generations so they can make wise decisions when it comes to the information they process and absorb. We’re no longer limited to the TV channels we have and the decisions producers make as far as what goes and what doesn’t; incredibly talented people can now become famous on You Tube, or also incredibly stupid people can do it; it’s up to us, the ones in front of that computer; each click counts, so where are we going to click?
Hi Pamela, I agree with you on the accessibility and democratization points – not on the “revolutionary tags”. I have researched in the local library via tags for a long time. I think the only difference to me is how easy I can access info and that I have so many sources – and not the one librarian (or politician allotting the money) decides whether that resource is available to me.
Thanks for your feedback Anke; I guess it’s true, tags are not a revolutionary concept itself, is the access to information that used to be “filtered” by librarians who had limited budgets and had to make tough choices (even when they would like to have all the books in the world in their shelves). Having access to all that information is the true revolutionary thing…right?
I am enjoying this conversation.
I think online tags, and the web in general, have a liberating ‘aura’ – the access to more resources is now made freely and widely available. That is for me the great plus, specially for those who can’t count on the services of a good, wealthy library . And then their is also the possibility of augmenting those resources with our own input with the ‘annotation’ of that data with our comments, ideas, reflections.. those resources no longer belong to one place, and they certainly aren’t static anymore. Hence, their meaning is also socially determined by those who access them and make sense of them. I cherish this flexibly and the fact that knowledge no longer is seen as something to be preserved in an enclosed environment to be accessed by only an exclusive group of people, but rather that knowledge is continuously constructed as part of collective knowing. Through tags we are able to contribute to that action of knowing as it’s easier to access content and also add something to it through the use of the same tags. But like you say, not everything that shines is gold, and good and bad resources are to be found under the same tag. That’s one of the effects of democratizing information. Still I think this is only one more challenge we need to address – we need to be critically aware of what is relevant and what is not. I am sure in a couple of years time, the semantic web will be even more powerful where it comes to organize and access information. Until that day arrive we can only keep tagging ours the best way we can and mentor others to do the same! Great post!