those keep off the grass signs

Vanity searching led me Rachel Clarke's post about group behavior and tagging. From my conversation all night tonight with Grace about visibility, popularity, what it means, value, and importance... I keep coming back to a central concept about the construction of value.  (Which I came to in thinking about literary movements.) When a group of people pay attention to each other visibly, they become important. This doesn't seem that it's necessarily so, but it is, because other people notice it. They might react with hostility, or denigration, dismissal, praise, or reward - but all those reactions mean importance.
Somehow this is tying in to the tiny bit of info I have observed from Dodgeball this weekend; and talking about how people seemed weirdly aware of Woolfcamp and we realized suddenly it might have been from it being a popular flickr tag for a couple of days because there were 30 of us with cameras uploading our photos all at once; and tying into what Rachel said about tagging as a group behavior and that middle area between private choosing of tags and hierarchical imposition of allowed tags.  Group  norms become established and people choose an alignment. Right on! Self-organizing... I'm a big fan of that concept. Like the way that U. of Chicago waited to build paths across the quads until they saw where the grass wore out - the natural patterns of how people chose to walk. That's not just smart - it's RIGHT, in a way that building top-down paths and then making "keep off the grass" signs, laws and penalties, is not right.  In other words... I'm an anarchist, duh - and believe in the power of anarchic, collective decision making processes.

Another random thought about tagging and that group-aligning that takes place:

I certainly noticed that sxsw was a very popular tag this weekend on Technorati and flickr, but I didn't tag that way because: 

-it made more sense to me to tag my photos "sxswi"- the first thing that occurred to me, that music and film people might not care about the geeks

- and then "swsw2006" because Mary Hodder said that was it, she decided, and, well, that was cool and everything else she says makes sense to me, so I figure she thought about it and has her reasons

- being associated with what is popular seems bad to me. Like, so what if it is a popular tag - if it isn't the right reason, I wouldn't want to bring people to "me" or whatever. i.e. am not popularity-seeking in that way. Bad information is unethical. Diluted information becomes meaningless, and that makes it bad. People need good information! Okay, not in this case, it's not "need" to want to see some dorky snapshots... but in other cases, as I saw with the hurricane disaster relief, it IS need.

- then I tagged things (when I remembered...) with "sxswi sunday" "sxswi monday" for my own use in organizing my memory of a day - something only important to me because my memory is bad and I value my sentience. Steven Schwartz called me a documentarian and I think of that often... It had never occurred to me before but it's true.  I'm an anarchic archivist. I would like to be a better one! I usually think of the real archivists as people like Quilty and Rook, who make beautiful taxonomies. Perhaps reframing the way I do things... That's part of why tagging got me so excited- it held out the possibility that my amassing of information might be more useful to me. 

 

Comments

[landismom]

I'm so fascinated by your liveblogging of sxsw--but damn, you post quickly! I've been reading every post, but not commenting, but keep it up.

[badgerbag]

Quick but kinda sloppy... I want to link everything up later when I have some breathing space! 8-)

[Wired]

http://wiredferret.livejournal.com/1058048.html?nc=7

My discussion on your discussion on tagging. ;>

[Lawrence Krubner]

"I keep coming back to a central concept about the construction of value. (Which I came to in thinking about literary movements.) When a group of people pay attention to each other visibly, they become important."

When you have time, could you elaborate on this? Or if you've already written about this, perhaps you could link to your previous writing on this? What was it about literary movements that inspired your thoughts on the construction of value?