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February 03, 2005
Grammar of Tagging
A comment I wrote on a one of Peterme’s posts got me thinking. Doesn’t “tagging” already feel like it’s got a rhetorical meaning, a grammatical purpose? How do we “get the joke” of a Flickr taggregation like “sometaithurts”? We get it because appling a tag can be an act of irony, description, or (obviously) association.
Here’s something Steven Johnson wrote about the grammar of hypertext links in his book “Interface Culture” (1997) which I think is relevant. (See also this short review) of IC at Abstract Dynamics.)
Suck’s great rhetorical slight of hand was this: whereas every other web site conceived hypertext as a way of augmenting the reading experience, Suck saw it as an oppurtunity to withold information, to keep the reader at bay. Even the sophisticated web auteurs offered up their links the way a waiter offers up fresh-ground pepper: as a supplement to the main course, a spice. (Want more? Just click here.) The articles themselves were unaffected by the “further readings” they pointed to. The links were just addenda, extensions of the primary argument. The Sucksters took the opposite tack. They used hypertext to condense their prose, not expand it. They benefits were clear: they could move faster through their sentences if they linked out strategically to other documents. They didn’t need to point out their allusions, they could just point to them and leave it up tot he reader to follow along. …. The rest of the web say hypertext as an electrified table of contents, or a supply of steriod-addled footnotes. The Sucketers saw it as a way of phrasing a thought. …. They used links as modifiers, like punctuation, something hardwired into the sentence itself.
Of course, this kind of self-consciousness in link-writing’s very common now—consider the way many Metafilter posts are written versus the way Wikipedia entries are written.
Is there “tagging as a way of phrasing a thought?” I think the grammatical aspect of tagging that gets people excited about it in ways that other forms of categorization haven’t. Generating content through ad-hoc cleverness is just more fun than dumping things in existing categories. See also the section on “the esoterica facet” in Dan post on music metadata, where he proposes a way for listeners to make creative and unforseen associations between artists.
Posted by Andrew at February 3, 2005 04:55 PM