nicotra / “folksonomy” and the restructuring of w r i t i n g
Jodie Nicotra
“Folksonomy” and the Restructuring of Writing Space
Metaphors that posit writing as linear, essayistic, and the province of a single author no longer fit the dynamic, newly spatialized practices of composition occurring on and via the Web. Using “folksonomy,” or multi-user tagging, as an example of one of these practices, this article argues for a new metaphor for writing that encapsulates how writing emerges spatially from dynamic, collective subjectivities in a network.
“Writing,” as Johndan Johnson-Eilola reminds us, “has always been about making connections: between writer and readers, across time, and through space” (“Negative” 17). Even in the most traditional print-based forms of writ- ing—operations like citing, quoting, and paraphrasing—connect the writer’s own thoughts and ideas to a larger web of other texts and ideas. So the idea that writing is about making connections is nothing new. What is new, perhaps, is the visibility that these connections have gained in the decade since the advent and explosive proliferation of the World Wide Web and other communication technologies. As a result, traditional definitions of writing as a discrete tex- tual object produced for a definable audience by a single individual or group of individuals working in concert have become constrictive, to say the least.
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Writing conceived in the “narrowest scriptural sense,” as Collin Brooke recently put it, has long felt limited, both in terms of what we think of as a text and our sense of the possibilities for communication. This conception also inevitably informs what we do in the classroom—that is, what we teach our students to unconsciously value as writing, and what we don’t. Chances are that even though a teacher may be aware of the limitations of what Lester Faigley and Susan Romano call “essayistic literacy,” owing to administrative constraints, student resistance, or lack of technological resources, knowledge, or training, she or he will inevitably end up teaching these linear, traditional forms anyway. But in the past decade, given the explosion of different and wholly unexpected forms of communication that have been made possible by a range of new tech- nologies (especially wireless ones) that still reach an apex of complexity on the Web, the chorus of voices calling for a much-expanded definition of writing has become even louder and more insistent. In this article I examine one of these new, emergent forms of communica- tion, dubbed “folksonomy” by the group of information architects who first noticed and began discussing it. Folksonomy (a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy), more commonly known as “multi-user tagging,” provides a new technology for organizing material on the Web, one that moves away from traditional hierarchies and classification systems. It also disrupts the idea of single authorship of the type criticized by the theorists mentioned above by showing how multiple, collective subjectivities “write,” enabling possibilities for configurations and systems to emerge as a result of activity of the so-called hive mind that could not have been anticipated or conceived of by an individual author working alone.
1. Problematics: What Is “Writing”? When an accepted definition of a concept no longer corresponds with the cir- cumstances, it limits or constricts the field of possibility in which that definition is operational. Such a constriction seems to be happening right now in the field of writing. Conversely, a new or expanded sense of a concept, as Edward Schi- appa suggests, “changes not only recognizable patterns of linguistic behavior, but also our understanding of the world and the attitudes and behaviors we adopt toward various parts of the world” (32). In asking the question “what is writing?” then, I’m interested less in the question of essences (“what is it re- ally?”) than in the rhetorical prospects of expanding the concept (“what does the current definition enable or prevent?”). Thus, though we are not interested in redefining “writing” once and for all, what gets counted as “writing” makes
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a difference to what we study as a field, what we teach in writing classrooms, and how we conceive of writing programs. Recent attempts to redefine writing have focused on expanding the con- ceptual framework that currently identifies “writing” as the act of producing a discrete textual object. These new definitions of writing highlight the fact that writing itself is a technology, and they take into consideration acts that previously would not have traditionally been considered “writing” so much as classifying, connecting, or providing metadata about information. For example, in her keynote address to the 2005 Computers and Composition conference, Andrea Lunsford called for a more expansive and dynamic definition of writing, arguing that “It is as though our old reliable rhetorical triangle of writer, reader, and message is transforming itself before our eyes, moving from three discrete angles to a shimmering, humming, dynamic set of performative relationships” (170). In Lunsford’s estimation, writing is no longer a directed, specific perfor- mance of a single kind of scriptural action, but rather is more broadly defined as
[a] technology for creating conceptual frameworks and creating, sustaining, and performing lines of thought within those frameworks, drawing from and expanding on existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs and symbols, incorporating materials drawn from multiple sources, and taking advantage of the resources of a full range of media. (171)
Arguably, the last two-thirds of Lunsford’s redefinition of writing represent what happens in even the most traditional forms of writing: using signs and symbols, incorporating materials from multiple sources, and using a full range of media. (One need only think of how the formal technical report—the cornerstone assignment of most technical writing courses—fulfills all three of these criteria.) The novelty of Lunsford’s definition lies in its attempt to create a new metaphor for writing. To modify traditional and still-dominant notions of writing as static and linear, Lunsford calls for a metaphor that is both more dynamic (performative) as well as spatial: writing in this redefinition is a technology for creating “conceptual frameworks” that create and channel thought in particular ways. Like Lunsford, Johnson-Eilola, among the first in the field to theorize hy- pertext’s implications for traditional notions of writing, wants to do away with the narrow definition of writing as a specific act of a single author producing a text. Indeed, as Johnson-Eilola argues in another essay, the larger economic sphere has fulfilled the work done by poststructuralist theorists and others in making the idea of a self-willed, autonomous producer obsolete. The type of
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worker valued in today’s economy possesses the ability to “become-DJ”—that is, to be able to find and draw from disparate cultural aspects, remix them, and spin them in a different way.1 To think about the ways in which writing has changed, Johnson-Eilola draws on labor theorist Robert Reich’s notion that the most significant economic force in recent years has been not produc- ers (and unquestioning submitters to authority valued by the manufacturing economy) but “symbolic analysts,” who as workers “are valued for their abil- ity to understand both users and technologies, bringing together multiple, fragmented contexts in an attempt to broker solutions” (“Database” 201). The symbolic-analytic subjectivity described by Johnson-Eilola can be easily applied to communication writ more broadly. In terms of recognizably communica- tion-oriented aspects of the Web, for example, blogs are one obvious form of symbolic-analytic writing—they cull bits of information from the Web and reorder them in a hypertexted, semi-narrative format for a more-or-less defined audience and purpose. Bloggers (whether they produce a single-authored blog or contribute to a multi-authored one) thus act as aggregator-DJs, compiling and linking sources from all over the Web in a way that provides readers with instant access to a network of other voices and texts. Though bloggers still serve what Foucault calls an “author-function” insofar as information is gath- ered, compiled, and synthesized into a type of narrative under the auspices of a single blog title, clearly this author-function is different in kind from that of traditional, print-based texts. What differentiates Web-based writing like blogging from traditional print-based writing is mostly a question of materiality. Scholars from Walter Ong to Jay David Bolter have discussed the changes in literacy practices that have been wrought by changes in the material technologies of literacy: from orality to writing, from writing to print, from print to digital media. Anne Wysocki writes, “part of what has changed the warp and woof that used to seem so steady underneath us is precisely that we are now aware of the warp and woof, that we are aware of the complex weaves of writing as a material practice” (2). Arguably, the digital technologies of new media merely amplify what the process of knowledge production has been all along. Though perhaps we tried to characterize knowledge production as a linear, controlled, argument-driven process, in actuality it always has been a deeply intuitive, affectively driven process of recombination and reorganization. Practices like blogging make this DJ process of “remixing” even more apparent. But Johnson-Eilola also calls attention to what he calls “two primary forms of online writing” that certainly stretch the boundaries of traditional defini-
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tions of writing: namely, database and Web search engine design (“Database” 218). The idea that a technology designed to help people search for informa- tion on the Web counts as a form of writing might come as a surprise; indeed, as Johnson-Eilola points out, to most people in rhetoric and composition these technologies are more or less invisible as forms of communication and so are “[ceded] to computer programming and computer engineering” (218). Certainly, the computer programmers and engineers who design these search engines have to rely on the usual toolbox of rhetorical concepts, including the most traditional tools of audience and situation. As Johnson-Eilola writes, “the space of a search engine screen has itself been painstakingly designed, with various sections written to satisfy an extremely large number of audiences. . . . And, as with traditional texts, the writers have thought very hard about their audience, addressing them, persuading them, moving them” (218). People don’t typically think of searching and organizing information as creative acts, but more as a means for sorting through a collection of objects that already exists. Databases and search engines may be extreme cases, but they show the extent of Johnson-Eilola’s desire for a conception of writing that accounts for the new formations that have emerged on the Web. In a brief and informal blurb (part of a Computers and Composition “Town Hall” section, Johnson-Eilola offers a clear and succinct response to his own question “What is writing?” Like Lunsford’s redefinition of writing, his answer attempts to get away from the traditional and persistent definition of an individual producing a textual artifact: “WRIT- ING AS THE RECURSIVE, SHARED, (AND SOMETIMES ABSCONDED WITH) COORDINATION OR BUILDING OF SPACES AND FIELDS. In other words, writers are not individuals (or even groups) who produce texts, but participants within spaces who are recursively, continually, restructuring those (and other) spaces” (“Writing” 1; emphasis his). “Writing” in this definition certainly has an expansive, performative aspect—not only is it “shared,” as in produced by multiple users, but it is conceived of as the building of a space rather than the production of a text.
2. Finding Oneself in Space (Digital Rhetoric and the Problem of “Findability”) The idea that new writing technologies, especially digital ones, would rely on the idea of space as a metaphor may be unsurprising—it is, after all, called “cyberspace.” But the shift in metaphor has significant consequences both for how we see writing and for what we fail to see. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in their influential text Metaphors We Live By (and as Lakoff
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discusses elsewhere), far from being “mere” rhetorical flourishes, metaphors form the very basis of language and human thought processes. As we speak, so we believe, and as we believe, so we act. What’s more, the dominant metaphor for a concept tends to preempt other possibilities for seeing the concept (Lakoff and Johnson 10). Thus, evidence that the metaphor for writing is shifting from one that is linear and time-bound (i.e., process) to one that is more spatial or architectural signals profound differences in the possibilities for imagining how we think and how we act vis-à-vis writing. The metaphorical concept of “writing as space” has spurred scholars in rhetoric and composition to attend to space as a force that affects the produc- tion, effects, and reception of writing. Just as changes in the material technolo- gies and media of writing or speech served to expose the fact that writing or speech always takes place via material technologies or a medium, a change in the space in which communication takes place calls attention to space as a fac- tor that affects communication. Consequently, a number of books and articles on “spatial rhetorics”—or, as an online compendium of sources related to the topic titles it, “Rhetorics of Space, Place, Mobility, Situation” (Howard)—have recently emerged. In her Geographies of Writing, for instance, Nedra Reynolds claims that though much attention has been given to the temporal aspects of writing (such as those emphasized in studies of process pedagogy), our postmodern era demands that we consider the spatial aspects of writing as well—the where of writing as well as the why and the when. Attending to the spatial aspects of writing, Reynolds suggests, will draw attention to “the sense of place and space that readers and writers bring with them to . . . writing, to navigating, arranging, remembering, and composing” (176). Part of the purpose of her book is pedagogical, to “[teach] writing as a set of spatial practices not unlike those we use in moving through the world” (3). While Reynolds attends to the way that space and geography inform our writing practices, Jay David Bolter considers writing itself as a space. In his book Writing Space, Bolter remarks upon the growing resonance of spatial metaphors since the advent of hypertext and the redistribution or rethinking of space it made possible. Bolter names our current hypertextual, digital era “the late age of print” (2), arguing that this era (like Jameson’s idea of “late capitalism,” from which the concept was borrowed) marks a transformation of our social and cultural attitudes, in this case, toward print itself. Cultural and technological forces converge in what Bolter calls “writing space,” which he defines as “a material and visual field, whose properties are determined by a writing technology and the uses to which that technology is put by a culture of readers and writers” (12). Writ-
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ing space is more than a neutral, passive background against which rhetorical production happens—rather, it is built by a recursive social process, by which it enables certain forms of rhetorical production, and is also configured by them. If virtual space is the new type of rhetorical space, then what are some of its characteristics? Contrary to concepts of space as a “container” that can hold communication, or as a something that exists prior to a writer’s entry into it, virtual space does not preexist the introduction of new elements to the network. Rather, through any of their interactions with the network, the users themselves help to configure and build the space. One might say that this has always been the case with writing and speech situations—that is, that the rhetorical space was created simultaneously with the occasion of speaking. However, in more traditional rhetorical forms, the active creation of rhetorical space was obscured to a certain extent by the conventionalizing of the rhetorical occasion and place. Classical orators spoke in the law courts or the agora; preachers speak in the pulpit; newspapers at least appear to provide an already constituted and available space for opinion and editorial writing (though we know, of course, that forces are at work to make this forum available to only certain types of writers—that is, the rhetorical “space” is not neutral).2 The nature of the Web, though, makes it obvious that its space is materially different—as a network, no space preexists, but needs to be created. A network’s success depends on having a critical mass of users to both create and upload information and to interact with it (such interactions may include operations like linking and commenting). Networks are governed by Metcalfe’s Law, which states that “the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. In other words, the value of networked sys- tems (i.e., telephone, fax, email, the Web) grows exponentially as the user popu- lation increases in a linear manner” (Morville 65). The more users participate in the site, both adding to it and commenting on the objects that other people have added, the richer and denser—and hence more valuable—the network becomes. The qualitative character of networks changes with the number of connections, and hence the space is built and changed as more and more users add material (or nodes) and interact with it by creating links, and so on. Or, to put it a different way (namely, Johnson-Eilola’s), networks are simply another name for the recursive, collective, building of conceptual spaces or fields: that is, writing. Conceiving of the spatial aspects of writing brings with it a concomitant attention to the rhetorical canon of arrangement. The equivalent of half a million Libraries of Congress has been added in the past several years to the
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general infosphere, mostly in the form of amateur publications: blogs, wikis, Web pages, music and multimedia files, emails, social networking sites, and so on. Along with this algorithmic increase in the amount of information comes the problem of organizing it—after all, information is not useful, at least for the purposes of knowledge production, until the information is arranged in the system in such a way that it means something to somebody. In his book Ambient Findability, information architect Peter Morville argues that what is most important in the contemporary information era is not authorship so much as finding and being found, concepts that rely on space and location as a metaphor. Morville defines “findability” as “a quality that can be measured at both the object and system levels” (4). That is, an individual object must have characteristics that make it findable (like the bright orange of a lifejacket), and the system also needs to be set up so that it can be navigated and so users can find what they need. In other words, an individual can create an extremely well-laid-out, usable, and attractive Web site, but if nobody can find it (that is, if your ideas of what the site is about don’t match up to others’ ideas) it is essentially useless, a rhetorical failure. Now more than ever the focus is much more on the organization of the total network than on the individual producer of texts. This interest in what we may loosely call the “context” (or, perhaps more accurately, the “ecology”) of information may not be new—however, the sheer amount of information with which we’re dealing now and the medium in which it primarily occurs has perhaps given the importance of organization over individual authorship a heightened intensity. Thus, the issue of findability is an important one for contemporary rhetoric and composition. This problem of organizing information has been acknowledged as an is- sue since at least 1945, when Vannevar Bush, an information scientist working for IBM, called for a new scientific program after the end of WWII. In his article “As We May Think,” Bush argued that the methods of sorting and organizing what he called the “growing mountain of research” in increasingly specialized scientific areas were pathetically inadequate for the task (1). Reminding readers that Gregor Mendel’s nineteenth-century genetic research was lost for twenty years because it failed to reach the right hands, Bush warned that similar ca- tastrophes would be bound to happen “as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential” (1). Crucial to preventing the replica- tion or effective loss of information would be the development of a system that could accomplish the feat of organizing, sorting, and digesting information, one that could make all of this information functionally available to its users. What Bush dreams up in “As We May Think” is a complicated mecha-
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nism called a “memex” that would allow an individual to physically record her own associative thought processes as she moved through and categorized large quantities of information. Bush’s idea for the memex was based on his assumption that the human mind does not work in the hierarchical, logical ways implicit in traditional classification systems. Rather, he says, “It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (4). Thus, the basis of the memex is what Bush calls “associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. . . . The process of tying two items together is the important thing” (4). Using the memex, one could find information and build webs of knowledge. When a user is researching a particular problem—say, for example, the history and properties of the Turkish longbow—she can call up an item and “join” it to a related item by means of a coding system, thus gradually building a trail between various items relevant to the question. The problems that Bush attempted to solve by inventing the memex (a prototype of which was never actually produced) have to do with the or- ganization of information, problems that still are evident today. Traditional methods of sorting and classifying information rely on a handful of controllers, who decide beforehand on a classification system and then insert each new piece of information into that previously established system. For example, the Dewey Decimal System, still the organizational system used by most libraries, divides information into ten categories: Psychology and Philosophy, Religion and Mythology, Social Sciences, and so on. Someone who wanted to find a book on technology, gender, and society, for instance, would first have to think about what category the system would place it under—would it be under the Technology category or under Philosophy and Psychology? To use the system effectively, the user would have to know the categories extremely well (or, al- ternately, know how to use the services of a specialist in the system—namely, a librarian) in order to find the item for which she was looking. But generally speaking, the user has no control over the information or how it is organized in a top-down, hierarchically organized classification system. Another problem with top-down classification systems is that no mat- ter how well the user learns the system’s categories, types of knowledge are not universal, transcendental, or stagnant, but change continually based on social and cultural factors. Though a supporter of the Dewey Decimal System remarks on its “cleverness . . . in choosing decimals for its categories,” which
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“allows it to be both purely numerical and infinitely hierarchical” (Wikipedia, “Dewey Decimal Classification”), the fact remains that it cannot anticipate all the categories of information that might possibly arise. For instance, searching under “folksonomy” or “metadata” on a library database inevitably turns up no results because both of those keywords are too new to exist yet as categories of information. Electronic library catalogues make doing subject searches much easier, but the fact remains that institutions, being slow by nature, simply can’t keep up with the pace of new information and types of knowledge. Web search engines like Google, with its indexing and page-ranking sys- tem, do address the problems of traditional classification systems to a certain extent. However, while Google may be better at finding relevant pages for a user query than other systems, it does have some significant limitations or blind spots. One problem that Google and other search engines have is with discerning what Morville calls the “aboutness” of a page (53). That is, sometimes a page or a resource will have a social significance or meaning that isn’t necessarily reflected in the content. For example, as the creator of the social bookmark- ing site del.icio.us points out, the two most popular user tags to describe the site Wikipedia.org are “free” and “reference,” neither of which appear on the home page for Wikipedia to describe the site. Indeed, when I did a Google search using the terms “free reference,” Wikipedia did not appear in the first fifty search entries, over three times as many as most users will scroll down through. Obviously, users see Wikipedia differently than it sees itself. And that is where the social aspect of categorization comes in—others may see or use your site or resource differently than you intended or expected it to be used. Many have argued that the associative system made possible by Bush’s hypothetical memex works better than traditional indexing systems because it builds in an affective level to the classification—that is, the user’s own inter- est. However, what the memex (and hypertext, for that matter) leaves out is the possibility for social aspects of categorization. While memex users could theoretically reproduce trails for insertion into other individual memexes, the social aspect by necessity stays on a very limited scale because there’s no infra- structure or network in place that can allow the social to multiply. This is the benefit of a bottom-up, user-driven system of organization, at least according to some information architects. As David Weinberger, an information philoso- pher, metaphorically puts it, “The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge. Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital revolution” (“Taxonomies” 1). “Tree” or hierarchical conceptions of knowledge and their associated organizational
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methods simply do not work as well when the space being organized is “flat,” as information architects characterize the space of the Web (Udell). Thus, these hierarchical methods of organization are gradually being supplanted on the Web by new ways that rely on a more bottom-up method—or, as Weinberger rephrases his tree metaphor in a different article, “The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together” (“Trees” 2). A new paradigm for organizing information on the Web, called variously “folksonomy,” “ethnoclassification,” or, more simply, “multi-user tagging,” illustrates Weinberger’s point about new methods of organizing virtual space. In the past several years, folksonomy has emerged as a type of home-grown solution for the problem of organization. But more than the simple organization of information that’s already there, folkson- omy also simultaneously spurs the production and addition of information to the Web. The result has been a remarkable burst of creativity and rhetorical production, the flourishing of a creative commons.
3. Collective Writing, Invention, and the Building of Conceptual Space
Commons may be rare. They may evoke tragedies. They may be hard to sustain. And at times, they certainly may interfere with the efficient use of important resources. But commons also produce something of value. They are a resource for decentralized inno- vation. They create the opportunity for individuals to draw upon resources without connections, permission, or access granted by others. They are environments that commit themselves to being open. Individuals and corporations draw upon the value created by this openness. They transform that value into other value, which they then consume privately. —Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas
The buzz about folksonomy as a new, bottom-up way of organizing informa- tion on the Web first started among information architects, a group that is a powerful and mostly invisible (for users) force both in how the Web is structured and how online corporations can use that structure to drum up more business. Part computer geek, part librarian, part business consultant, and part cultural theorist, an information architect is perhaps the most prototypical example of the symbolic-analytic workers discussed by Johnson-Eilola. The most well- known information architects, including Thomas Vander Wal, Clay Shirky, Louis Rosenfeld, and David Weinberger, have become virtual town criers of the
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Web, noticing and analyzing trends and developments long before the average Web user does, and those who want to be in the know about the latest in Web architecture make it a point to read their blogs regularly. Vander Wal first coined the term “folksonomy” in an October 2004 blog posting, following a discussion that began among information architects with the February 2004 introduction of the beta version of Flickr, a photo-sharing website started by Caterina Fake and her husband Stewart Butterfield. “Folk- sonomy” referred specifically to Flickr’s built-in method for helping users to organize their online photo collections by allowing them to assign lists of “tags” or keywords to individual photos. Following the introduction of Flickr, more sites that employed folksonomies as a method of organizing objects and information quickly appeared, including del.icio.us (a site that allows users to upload and tag their own and others’ bookmarks), CiteULike (a site for sharing and categorizing academic papers), LibraryThing, SteveMuseum, 43 things, and the enormously popular YouTube. Commercial sites like Amazon.com and iTunes have jumped on the folksonomy bandwagon as well, recognizing that allowing multiple users to attach their own tag to an object like a book or a song increases the likelihood that someone searching the site for a particular thing would find (and possibly buy) that object. The idea of allowing multiple users to name or annotate the same set of objects on the Web in order to create more efficient and effective searching is generally attributed to Ben Shneiderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. For the 2001 conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, Shneiderman set up kiosks where members could tag any of 3,300 photos taken over the past twenty years of meetings. Shneiderman used an application called Microsoft Access, which allows users to type in keywords to the database and then drag and drop the names of the people they recognized directly onto a photo. Later users could then search for photos based on the dragged-and-dropped names. Flickr is based on a similar idea, the difference being that instead of one person up- loading photos into a database, an unlimited number of users can (in order to manage the size of the site, however, users are limited as to how many photos they can upload per month). On Flickr, photos can be searched and grouped into photo streams by tags, and the site allows people designated by the user as “friends” or “family” to add their own tags to photos. Of course, sites that enable users to share photos with friends and family aren’t that new; photo-processing sites like Snapfish and Shutterbug have en-
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abled people to share online photo sets for years before Flickr’s instantiation. What makes Flickr different is that the tags added to photos create linkages among large groups of individual users who otherwise would never have run into each other. If I upload photos from my Iceland vacation, for instance, and one of the tags I assign them is “Iceland,” those photos are instantly connected to all the other photos on Flickr that bear the “Iceland” tag, including those by Iceland natives and other tourists. (As of the writing of this article, a search on the “Iceland” tag brought up over 103,000 photos.) Thus, as a Salon.com article written shortly after the advent of Flickr pointed out:
The result is a dynamic environment, prone to all sorts of instant fads, created by members inspiring each other to go in new directions with their cameras. It makes digital photography not only instantly shareable, but immediately participatory, creating collaborative communities around everything from the secret life of toys to what grocery day looks like. The result is an only-on-the-Web conversation where text and image are intermingled in a polyglot that has all the makings of a new kind of conversation. (Mieszkowski, “Friendster” 1)
The conversational aspect of Flickr comes in because not only can users search for all the photos on a particular tag, but the Flickr site also allows them to make comments on photos, mark the photo as a “favorite,” add the user to a contact list, and blog about the photos. Temporary communities emerge around par- ticular photo streams or ideas and then fall apart. For instance, a temporary and informal Flickr community sprang up around one user’s “squaring the circle” idea, whereby round objects like flowers or wheels were framed in squares—this started a temporary fad, as different users decided to try out the technique on their own cameras. A more formally organized community group (community groups bring together any user who is interested in a particular topic—users don’t necessarily know each other) is called “A Day in the Life Of,” where group members choose a date, post five photos that summarize their life that day, and tag them with the initials DILO to mark their inclusion in the group. Flickr is an example of what Vander Wal designates as a “narrow folkson- omy,” where a single object is tagged by one or only a few users—hence, while the tags would have value for that user and a small group of people associated with him or her, they have less relevance for a wider group. By contrast, Vander Wal designates sites that allow the same object (like the URL for a website, or a book on Amazon or LibraryThing) to be tagged by multiple users as “broad folksonomy.” In terms of effectiveness and meaning, Vander Wal says broad folk- sonomies are better than narrow ones, because the more centralized a “node”
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(a site like de.licio.us, or Technorati, for example), the better it can aggregate and syndicate information, and the more valuable it is for a user. Tags, produced by multiple users, thus function as tools for invention. While traditional rhetoric imagines invention as a process that occurs within the mind of the rhetorical producer (perhaps in interaction with the world), the process of invention through tagging results from interaction between multiple users who are unknown to one another. Consider 43 things, for in- stance, a folksonomy-based site that encourages its users to “Write down your goals,” “Get Inspired,” and “Share your progress.” Users write down their goals (which range from “love my body” and “have more free time,” to “Watch all episodes of Mr. Bean ever made”) and provide updates of their progress. They get support from other users in the form of “cheers,” (a website function that links the cheerer’s page to the cheer-ee’s), advice, and consolations. But the goals written down by users on 43 things also serve as a form of invention via the site’s tag cloud—the more popular “things” to accomplish (i.e., the most frequently assigned tags) appear in larger, bolder font. Tag clouds serve not only as a record of what users have written, but they also serve to shape and direct how goals are described, in a recursive process of invention. If a user writes “running a marathon” as a goal, for instance, that user can see that four thousand other people also have selected running a marathon as a goal. Users tend to phrase goals as other people have phrased them so as to be included in the community—so, for instance, one would not tend to write “running 26.2 miles” as one’s goal, because other members of the community would fail to recognize it as a goal in which they’re interested. As Mieszkowski writes in another Salon article,
Tags don’t have to be popular—you could use obscure words to tag all your in- formation and end up with a secret language known only to you. But then your data doesn’t get to play with everyone else’s. “The fact that you know that there is a social aspect to this actually encourages you to pick tags that are relevant,” says Technorati’s Dave Sifry. “It’s kind of like this invisible hand of positive social pressure that results in something that’s much bigger than the person himself could ever hope to achieve.” (“Steal” 3)
Howard Rheingold, a popular writer who investigates the social effects of new technologies, talks in the same article about the connections that are estab- lished between users and things through the process of tagging: “I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they’ve tagged. . . . And isn’t
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that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful—and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off you” (Mieszkowski, “Steal” 2). In other words, in folksonomy invention is directly linked to the social in a way that simply does not happen in the conception of invention in traditional, essayistic literacy, that which consists of allowing one’s image of the audience to guide or direct the kinds of claims, reasons, or examples that one uses. With folksonomy, rhetorical agency and intention become much more complicated, because invention is revealed as not simply the product of an individual, isolated mind, but as a distributed process driven by the interaction of a multitude of users. It becomes impossible to assign the origins of the invention to any one individual; rather, invention emerges from a crowd, what Kevin Kelly (following early twentieth-century entomologist William Morton Wheeler) calls the “hive mind” (Kelly, Out 12). Users engaged in this process of creating, uploading, and tagging Web objects (whether it’s videos they’ve created, digital photos, or a website URL) are acting as “prosumers,” a term coined by Alvin Toffler in his 1980 book The Third Wave to describe a future consumer who doesn’t pas- sively consume goods but participates in their creation in order to tailor them more to individual tastes and desires. In terms of the Web, prosumption has less to do with economic consumption than with acts of creative and rhetori- cal production. The act of prosumption is particularly interesting for rhetoric and composition because it rides the historically troublesome binary between rhetorical production and hermeneutics, between “little” and “big” rhetoric; the individuals who upload and tag videos on YouTube are both producing and “reading” information. Kelly (who often casts himself in the role of techno- prophet) writes, “The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned 10 years ago. This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking—smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action—into the main event” (“We Are” 1). Contrary to views of the Web that say that it makes users into passive consumers of information, practices like folksonomy spur rhetorical production. Folksonomy, especially the “broad” folksonomy identified by Vander Wal, represents a truly collective form of writing in that thousands of users are both creating and adding information to the network (often prompted by a collective, recursive process of invention) and organizing that information. In this nondirectional, bottom-up way, the conceptual space that Johnson-Eilola identifies as writing gets built.
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Our habituated ways of thinking about and teaching writing are analo- gous to a dress that no longer fits: it chafes and squeezes in the wrong places. Though, as Doug Hesse argues, we need to “save a place for essayistic literacy” (and certainly this kind of literacy shows no sign of abandoning us anytime soon), linking the acts of prosumption and rhetorical production in which our students already gleefully participate with what we teach as “writing” in our composition classrooms will infuse a greater sense of relevance to what we try to do as teachers of writing. Incorporating an awareness of folksonomy and other “prosumption” practices into regular classroom practice can have several transformational effects on students. First and most basically, it gives us another way to make students aware that “composition” takes many forms aside from what they typically think of as academic writing. Blog entries, comments on someone else’s contribution, videos uploaded to YouTube, and even photographs can all count as “compositions.” Second, through the actual practice of tagging their contributions, students inevitably develop a keener sense of audience awareness, because they must consider how people might find, receive, and ultimately use the information that the student has con- tributed. Finally, and most generally, attending to practices of non-essayistic writing helps students develop what one might call a metacritical awareness. Rather than viewing writing as an act that involves dumping information into pre-existing containers (an attitude that I see in my own classes, particularly among beginning writers), students learn to perceive themselves as active participants in the building of a network. That is, in becoming practiced in folksonomy and other acts of prosumption, students learn that they ultimately have an effect on the shape that the network takes. Since the implicit goal for many rhetoric-based writing courses involves training students to think rhetorically about the effects that their writing might have on an audience, incorporating folksonomy and other nontraditional composition practices into the material of the course increases the chance that students will leave the composition classroom with the unambiguous conviction that writing can be both democratic and participatory.
Notes 1. Jeff Rice also discusses the concept of writer-as-DJ in his hypertext “essay” “The Street Finds Its Own Use for Things.” Rice recommends a critical use of the concept of DJ as a way to interrupt the perceptions of linearity that inhere in traditional writing: “In composition studies, the turntable and mixing skills DJs employ are considered irrelevant to an academic practice concerned with clear, concise, and
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linear dissemination of information, typically in a prescribed format that bears no resemblance to the DJ’s methods of record collecting and, currently, sampling. . . . Cutting and pasting disparate sounds and music, the DJ forms intricate collages, fashioning new writing from a collection of past works. Often, and particularly in hip hop, DJ compositions are critical examinations of cultural practices: racism, misogyny, drug abuse, media influence and control—all topics that also dominate a considerable amount of writing courses and composition textbooks.” 2. Similar arguments have been made in the field of genre studies—i.e., that although genres by their nature appear to be ready-made “containers” to be filled by the individual writer or speaker, they actually help to influence and shape conditions for rhetorical production as well as the identity and ethos of the writer. See, for example, Amit Bawarshi’s Genre and the Invention of the Writer.
Works Cited Bawarshi, Amit. Genre and the Invention of Sources.” 6 March 2007.
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Lunsford, Andrea. “Writing, Technologies, tion Laboratory, U of Maryland. June and the Fifth Canon.” Computers and 2000.
Jodie Nicotra Jodie Nicotra received her PhD in rhetoric and composition from Penn State Uni- versity in 2005. She is currently assistant professor and assistant director of writing at the University of Idaho.
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