Tags as social constraints

I found an interesting post about the social implications of tagging by Nathan Lovejoy at swarmingmedia.com in response to my post, "Lightweight social interactions in a loosely coupled offline world."  He questions whether a future data pool of tags on people could create social shackles of sorts.


The beauty of tagging, in my mind, is very different.  Tagging brings about more diverse meanings to things not fewer categorical meanings.  I characterize my relationships with people and the things that I know about them in many congruous ways, not by hierarchical, deterministic structures.  

My friend Hunter, for example, is a great guy to have in my Netflix Friends list for his unusual film taste, but he does me no good in discussions about RSS.  He is also a close friend from years back.  A Foucaultian structure to that relationship would mean that "friend" would come before "film recommender" based on some hierarchical meaning to my relationship with him.

I prefer the deconstruction approach to explain the multitude of relationships and tags I can apply to Hunter for what they really mean to me.  Each relationship has unique and undeniable truth in my interpretation of their value.  The tag itself is a symbolic and perhaps even temporary representation of value.  Tags are both subjective and independent.  One doesn't come before the other.

They are also additive data.  I would never tag Hunter as "-RSS", yet he very well could be insightful about RSS to other people who might, in turn, tag him with "RSS".

There may be cases where building meaning from collections of tags will give institutions dependent on structuralism some kind of new insight that could be used for power or for classifying people into buckets or something.  But those are just fears that should never be used to stop progress.  

Tags are a key ingredient to a larger world view rather than existential markers that institutions could use to box me in.

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