Folksonomy and the Folks

                As defined by Wikipedia, Folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. If you have ever been to websites such as YouTube, Hulu, or any site that contains a lot of subject matter, you have undoubtedly come across a “folksonomic” identification tag. These are in place to help people find media that is related to what they are watching or reading. Some say that this system of tagging may lead to the rise of the amateur and the unnecessary devaluation of professionally created media. This is simply untrue.

                I don’t want to be misinterpreted throughout this essay as a person who is against amateurs creating what they see to be valuable. I think recreational artists, if you will, deserve a lot of credit for what they do. It is extraordinarily difficult to obtain a result that one wants without a great deal of technological help. Granted some of the user-generated content that is on the web today is arguably valuable to society. A lot of what one can find on websites such as YouTube, where the user is allowed to post any video with any subject matter (as long as it is cleared by YouTube’s censors), is not what anyone would call creative. They are simply a bunch of idiots running around with a cheap camera or camera phone doing stupid things. People who think that the rise of user-generated content is leading to the devaluation of professionally produced media look to movies such as the Jackass series to prove their point. When a person like me who believes that user-generated content is actually increasing the value of media created by professionals view a movie series like Jackass, we see a group of people who have evaluated today’s society and studied what people like to watch. They then take their data and come up with an idea that is so overboard and so insane that it can only be done “by professionals or under the supervision of professionals.”

I think collective online activities do promote a new form of participatory democracy and the development of new and accurate folksonomies. The creation of folksonomic tags has aided the internet user in finding more information on a subject than if there were no tags. When people are allowed to contribute to other people’s research through folksonomic tags, they have taken part in a self-created participatory democracy.