INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

There has been an inrush of information on how humans deal with feeling a loss of control over the past few weeks, and how the internet has a positive (or negative) effect on our experience of chaotic times. This article from the New York Times postulates that, while people’s tendency is to seek out more and more information in troubled times (and that need is more than handily satisfied by the internet), it actually leads to more anxiety as one tries to keep up with the endless tide. The article follows on the heels of a study that relates feelings of one’s life being in chaos and the adoption of superstition and conspiracy theories.
So what does this have to do with tagging? In the past 8 years, there’s been a huge increase in the importance of internet news and user-generated content, along with the invention of tagging as we know it today and other Web 2.0 technologies. This explosion of content and information consumption coincides with and is to some extent driven by a society concerned with the ever-changing state of war and economic downturn.
I submit that tagging in praticular has become ubiquitous because tagging allows people to exercise control over their own content, and, even better, other people’s content. So much content now exists that the concept of having personal control is particularly attractive, rather than conforming to categories imposed by an outside source.
In terms of an externalized benefit to society, I agree that good machine tags are probably more useful, but I think it’s particularly true that human-generated tags are far more psychologically important to individual humans.