Comments on: Digital vs. Physical Information

By: Cristina Costa

Cristina Costa — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:35:56 +0000

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!

By: Pam.A

Pam.A — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:21:26 +0000

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?

By: Anke

Anke — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:09:55 +0000

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.