“Folksonomy” and the Restructuring of Writing Space

NICOTRA / “FOLKSONOMY” AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF W RITING 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 writing—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 textual object produced for a definable audience by a single individual or group of individuals working in concert have become constrictive, to say the least. CCC 61:1 / SEPTEMBER 2009 W259 W259-276-Sept09CCC.indd 259 9/14/09 5:32 PM CCC 6 1 : 1 / SEPTEMBER 2009 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 technologies (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 communication, 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 W260 W259-276-Sept09CCC.indd 260 9/14/09 5:32 PM NICOTRA / “FOLKSONOMY” AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF W RITING 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 conceptual 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 W261 W259-276-Sept09CCC.indd 261 9/14/09 5:32 PM CCC 6 1 : 1 / SEPTEMBER 2009 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 ability 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 communication-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- W262 W259-276-Sept09CCC.indd 262 9/14/09 5:32 PM NICOTRA / “FOLKSONOMY” AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF W RITING tions of writing: namely, database and Web search engine design (“Database” 218).

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