Life in the Network

Here’s a picture of me at the height of my personal fashion genius. I truly believe my style has been increasingly boring since the day this picture was taken, however I am still fond of festive outfits, stripes and polka dots, hats, and bears. I've overcome my skepticism of tomatoes.

Tags/folksonomies are interesting to me as a reflection of how people understand things. If someone looked at my bookmarks on Del.icio.us and saw a number of sites related to explosives, it would make a difference whether they were tagged “revenge� or “dissertation�. Similarly, searching Flickr with the tag “booty� could lead to pictures of very different things, depending on whether the tagger was a pirate, a rapper, or my mom (try it, if you dare). I suppose this could be the sort of situation that leads Sturtz to note that searching with tags “encourages browsing and introduces a degree of serendipity.� (Communal Catorigorization p. 4) One can never know exactly what one will find.

Tags make use of simple language. I work with English language learners at the public library, and I see them struggle with Internet searches simply because their spelling and vocabulary aren’t advanced enough to describe what they’re looking for, and forget phrase searching or Boolean operators. So it seems that tagging is another way that the web is made more accessible and democratic, allowing untrained/inexperienced people to not only create content, but also to construct ways for others to find what they’ve posted, and find other people that think in similar ways or have similar interests.

Images on the internet are a striking example of speed and reach. Gurak talks about visual reach (Cyberliteracy, p. 35), which is an idea that strikes me as being more true of Flickr or image-centered sites than ones like Del.icio.us. I can see images from New York or Iowa or Japan. Geography doesn’t matter, and is often unknowable. Language barriers virtually (!) disappear.