Market populism in the folksonomies debate

I happened to be reading Thomas Frank's One Market Under God this week, at the same time I was listening to Clay Shirky's Etech talk Ontology is Overrated. I was struck by how Ontology is Overrated uses the core arguments of market populism to make its points.

Market populism is the view, which gained tacit acceptance in the 90s, that markets are inherently democratic. As Frank explains:

Markets expressed the popular will more articulately and more meaningfully than mere elections. Markets conferred democratic legitimacy; markets were a friend of the little guy; markets brought down the pompous and the snooty; markets gave us what we wanted; markets looked out our interests.

Whether these are Clay's politics or not, I don't know. But Ontology is Overrated follows many of the rhetorical patterns of market populism's promoters:

• an out-of-touch elite ("ontologists") makes it hard for users to find thing on the web, particularly by their adherence to strictly hierarchical classification systems optimized for finding things on shelves,
• that the solution is bringing "market logic" to classification,
• that this solution is intrinsically fair (an argument made in the negative by demonstrating "ontologies" as unfair),
• and that this is all inevitable, a "forced move."

Rather than dealing with the technical errors and omissions (of which there are many, and I may point out a few in later posts) I wanted to focus on the ideological aspect of the talk.

In planning the folksonomies panel for the IA Summit, Peter Merholz pointed out that tagging has been surrounded by a "strange zeitgeist that seems out of step with its actual value." At times it's been hard to separate out the practical enthusiasm for tags and folksonomies (which I share) from the ideological enthusiasm which suggests that tags are the One True Way.

Clay has been leading the ideological charge and, frankly, the information architecture community has been struggling to respond to it. Meanwhile, his views are accepted by some as the new orthodoxy of classification. (Christopher Anderson called this talk a devastating takedown of taxonomies; I've yet to find a single criticism of it.)

But Ontology is Overrated is only about classification in a superficial sense. In talking up the future of tagging and folksonomies (as well as the link infrastructure that now determines the relevance of search results), it recapitulates a bunch of New Economy thinking about disintermediation and over-throwing corporate hierarchies. In essence, this is about cutting out the middle-man and over-throwing classification hierarchies.

And though Clay characterizes the middle man's problem as being preoccupied with organizing books on shelves (which reflects, I think, a fairly immature understanding of classification on the web), he goes to some lengths to show how Clouseau-esque these ontologists are:

"There's a top-level category... in the Library of Congress scheme--the Former Soviet Union. The best they were able to do was just tack "former" on to that entire zone previously categorized as the Soviet Union. Not because that's what they thought was true about the world, but because they don't have the staff to re-shelve all the books."

The separation of the USSR into 15 or so independent states was no easy transition--politically or categorically-so I suspect the Library of Congress wasn't the only one stuck on how to describe the Soviet Union after the fall. The Washington Post abandoned the "Former USSR" label only recently.

(And would it be any easier to go through thousands of tagged URLs and decide which was about Georgia and which was about Azerbaijan and which was about Turkmenistan? Even with social metadata, issues of aboutness persist.)

This is not to say that Clay is wrong about tags being a useful, even vital, way of organizing certain kinds of information. The trouble is that most of the practical objections to folksonomies--as well as the arguments for a peaceful co-existence between classification schemes--have been met with the forced move response.

The argument from inevitability is a great way to simultaneously sidestep your opponent's objections while confirming your own assumptions. It's also good for keeping the discussion in the abstract rather than concrete. Because it's a forced move, there's no point asking why both Amazon and Wikipedia use categories. Or why does the failure to organize the whole web into a hierarchical taxonomy (like the Yahoo Directory) mean that taxonomies are useless? Or, like, do you seriously mean that tagging will replace all other kinds of categorization? Across the whole freaking web? Surely not.

One can be enthusiastic about tags and folksonomies (I am) and still confront the serious problems that face them as a stand-alone tool for organizing information. Turning a blind eye to those problems is what turns strange zeitgeist into irrational exuberance.