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As we get used to the lack of physical constraints, as we internalize the fact that there is no shelf and there is no disk, we’re moving towards market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value. (Shirky Ontology Is Overrated)
To return to the earlier discussion of search and its limitations, we should ask whether there could be some means other than using editorialized content or algorithm-determined relevance, by which users could find useful information on the Internet. The above quote from Clay Shirky hints at the possibilities: the web is not constrained by space, time, or top-down logic. What Shirky is referring to is user-generated content, that is, content that has been created and tagged by many, many users, rather than by a few authorities. The idea of market logic he refers to is that even though the individuals tagging information may have contradictory or competing points of view, they provide, in sheer numbers, a more accurate depiction of how a piece of information could be found than a single, really consistent, really knowledgeable person. An example is the site del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that allows users to create tags (identifying descriptions) for any website they view with whatever keywords occur to them. As del.icio.us describes it,
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser. This has several advantages. . .you can share your bookmarks publicly. . .you can find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. . .You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember — which may help you find things that are useful for you, too. (del.icio.us)
Here, the individual motivation of a user comes into play, but group value is gleaned because that individual tagging scheme is placed with all the other individual users’ tags, creating a network of search terms created by and for users intimate with that information. As Ontology Is Overrated states it, “Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them” (Schacter qtd).
To understand where the ideas of user-generated content can be linked with Derrida’s previously referenced discussions of language, we can compare a quote from Derrida and one from Shirky:
an opposition of metaphysical concepts (e.g. speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the confrontation of two terms, but a hierarchy and the order of subordination. Deconstruction cannot be restricted or immediately pass to a neutralization: it must, through a double gesture, a double science, a double writing—put into practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes. (Derrida 21)
Merges are Probabilistic, not Binary – Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. Instead of saying that any given tag “is” or “is not” the same as another tag, del.icio.us is able to recommend related tags by saying “A lot of people who tagged this ‘Mac’ also tagged it ‘OSX’.” We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of “kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree”. That is a really profound change. (Shirky)
What we see in Derrida’s quote is that in order for deconstruction to provide a “means of intervening in the field it criticizes,” it must resist binary oppositions and reactionary swings from one extreme to another. With Shirky’s quote, we actually see this movement in play; rather than rejecting traditional top-down categorization by rejecting categorization altogether, user-generated content uses the structure of category, but subverts it, changes it into categorization “where individual differences don’t have to be homogenized,” and where overlap and difference, rather than mutual exclusivity, represent the norm—best of all, user-generated categorization schemes work from the bottom up to create value. User-generated content, in the end, strengthens its position in the canon of useful web information not by reinforcing existing categorization schemes, but by being responsive to users’ changing views of categorization.
