Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags

Money quote:

One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.

The mind-reading aspect shows up in conversations about controlled vocabularies. Whenever users are allowed to label or tag things, someone always says “Hey, I know! Let’s make a thesaurus, so that if you tag something ‘Mac’ and I tag it ‘Apple’ and somebody else tags it ‘OSX’, we all end up looking at the same thing!” They point to the signal loss from the fact that users, although they use these three different labels, are talking about the same thing.

The assumption is that we both can and should read people’s minds, that we can understand what they meant when they used a particular label, and, understanding that, we can start to restrict those labels, or at least map them easily onto one another.

This looks relatively simple with the Apple/Mac/OSX example, but when we start to expand to other groups of related words, like movies, film, and cinema, the case for the thesaurus becomes much less clear. I learned this from Brad Fitzgerald’s design for LiveJournal, which allows user to list their own interests. LiveJournal makes absolutely no attempt to enforce solidarity or a thesaurus or a minimal set of terms, no check-box, no drop-box, just free-text typing. Some people say they’re interested in movies. Some people say they’re interested in film. Some people say they’re interested in cinema.

The cataloguers first reaction to that is, “Oh my god, that means you won’t be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!” To which the obvious answer is “Good. The movie people don’t want to hang out with the cinema people.” Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there’s no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches.

When we get to really contested terms like queer/gay/homosexual, by this point, all the signal loss is in the collapse, not in the expansion. “Oh, the people talking about ‘queer politics’ and the people talking about ‘the homosexual agenda’, they’re really talking about the same thing.” Oh no they’re not. If you think the movies and cinema people were going to have a fight, wait til you get the queer politics and homosexual agenda people in the same room.