A vague concept waiting to materialize.
Frankly, I don't remember when I first encountered tagging. It's the sort of thing
that rather than getting invented gets uncovered. The world is probably full of
closet taggers who don't really know that they're taggers rather than filers (and
are only waiting for a digital environment for their true tagging nature to come
to the fore). There are people who see one and only one image in a Rorschach test,
while others keep finding more and more objects and
have to be stopped with cries of "enough already". Perhaps we're dealing
with personality types - filers and taggers - who truly see the world differently.
I'd be hesitant to go that far, but my experience of teaching internet basics
over the past decade sometimes causes me to think that there's actually something
in such a claim.
One of the aspects of internet use that I used to teach
was the difference between a search engine and an online catalog (and why we'd
sometimes want one, and sometimes the other). For a catalog I'd always use Yahoo!,
basically because it was the catalog with the greatest depth, allowing us to burrow
from category to sub-category to sub-sub-category until we reached the category
that housed the particular items we were trying to find. The concept was quite
simple to grasp, but along the way we'd also encountered cross-referenced categories
that Yahoo! designated with the at sign (@) - (it has lots
of names in many languages, but apparently never got a full-fledged proper
name in English).
The "main", breadcrumbs path appears just under
"Poetry", but when we look at the categories available for clicking,
of the 14 pictured here, six of them are actually coming from "somewhere
else".
These cross-references were aesthetically disturbing to many of my students who
found it very difficult to accept the idea that a sub-category was being imported
from a different category. Even when they were able to accept the idea that this
allowed them to find items that they might otherwise not be able to locate without
starting again from the top, it still caused them a great deal of discomfort,
and many of my students simply preferred to ignore that this cross-referencing
was actually happening. The idea that something
could actually be in two places at the same time
just wasn't something that they wanted to consider, or (at least at that stage
of their digital experience) had the conceptual framework which permitted them
to make sense of it.
