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Blogging and Folksonomy: Experts, Fear, and Why You Can't Go Back
Fear is a powerful tool experts use to get you to pay them for their opinion. Is a lot of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt we hear about blogging, tagging, and other social media just an attempt by threatened experts to re-establish their market value in the face of revolutionary change?
Sections: Emerging Practice
Topics: folksonomy
Blaise Cronin, Dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University notes:
The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.
via Robert Scoble in The Red Couch: Blog backlash, academian style
Although many don't realize it, Information Science has played a central role in the evolution of the Internet and is one of the fields that finds itself the most altered by it. Lately we've seen a lot of respected professionals like Dean Cronin weigh in on the value of blogging, tagging, and other social media. Invariably, the refrain is a call to return to a higher, earlier standard, or at least a plaint about the current degradation of standards and lack of true intellectual content.
I have a few reactions:
- Usually when you have this level of reaction, somebody's had their apple cart overturned and would like for things to return the way they were.
- There is usually some level of legitimacy to the criticisms. However, rather than motivating a return to the old way, the criticisms are likely to motivate the next wave of innovation.
- Generally, there is no going back. The motivation is just not there. The old way has already been discredited enough in most people's eyes to warrant the attempt to switch to something new. By the time these types of backlash articles surface, the old way has ceased to be an alternative.
- Oddly, as Scoble notes parenthetically in bringing us Dean Cronin's quote, the critic is often also attempting to establish their own credibility in the new medium. Fear is a strong motivator and often used by experts to establish their value so that you will pay them money for their opinions.
Bud posted this on May 8, 2005
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Comments
Bud, I'm a bit surprised that you would imply that I'm an expert. ;)
Anyway, my criticisms were not of tagging or social media, but of Clay's arguments for them. As I said in my post, I'm enthusiastic about tags and folsonomies. But not so enthusiastic that I'm blind to their challenges.
The real issues are not folksonomies vs. taxonomies vs.ontologies, or the old way vs. the new way, or irrational exuberance vs. backlash. The real isssues are: what works? what helps people find things? what creates value for people and organizations? Whatever it is... that is what is we should be doing--regardless of whether it's tagging, a taxonomy or a recipe box.
Posted by: Gene at May 10, 2005 12:55 PM
