At the IA Summit in Vancouver last weekend, I attended a talk about Pace Layering and Resilience Theory. It was an interesting talk and I liked the speakers, D. Grant Campbell and Karl V. Fast. It got me thinking, but tangentially.
Karl began the talk by bringing our attention to an explorer whose lack of fame is way out of whack with his importance, daring, and cool discoveries: William Dampier. A picture of Dampier was set against a list of words that might be used to describe, or tag him: explorer, naturalist, mapmaker, and so on. Finally when all were psyched about having a new hero to add to their roster, the final tag, “pirate” appeared on the screen. Gasp! No longer was Dampier a hero; he was now a dirty pirate, and his many accomplishments were sullied by the foul means he (no doubt) used to attain them.
The wrong tag, Karl noted, could do a lot of damage, and completely change the sense of something.
Of course I don’t know much about Dampier, but it dawned on me that inherent but unspoken in this situation is that our organization schemes combine with the internal process they model and keep us in blinders. We’re used to filing people away mentally in only a few categories, and whenever something very different comes up, we freak.
This unrealistic mental categorizing leads to the situation where one disagreeable tag could, as Karl says, sully a whole image. And people will do all they can to avoid seeing people they hold in esteem in compromising positions. (If they want to continue to admire them.) No one wants to see their parents doing the kinds of crazy, messy, human stuff that the rest of the world does. But by opening up the world to tagging we rip the veil. Everyone can add their view of something or someone, and this can be strange, I think, because we’re just not used to it.
It seems to have disappeared, but at HotWired, I once reviewed a book by Brian Eno, called A Year with Swollen Appendices. In it, Eno plays around with a bunch of tags to describe himself. Among the standard mix of stuff, Eno provocatively (or increasingly, prosaically) labels himself a “masturbator.†Did it color the rest? Not much. The point of the exercise, I believe, was to add a little bit of honesty. You might say, Eno, that’s a little too much information. But I’m always annoyed by that phrase, and the kind of prudish outlook it usually embodies, even if ironically.
We are able to view the world as more than a fairy tale; we can handle whatever information gets thrown our way–and we certainly don’t need our filing systems to help spin doctor what we’re examining.
We can handle knowing that Dampier was a pirate, our girlfriend picks her nose, and our parents are real people. A black and white view might help us make quick decisions, and sometimes that’s good. We just don’t need to throw away inconvenient truths.
And that’s why tagging might help us all get a little wiser, a little more forgiving.
