Thing 13

I think that social bookmarking and tagging will be useful to me. I do worry about becoming a "lemming" and "following the herd". I understand the need for conventions and for a controlled vocabulary. Still I suspect that there are more cognitive liabilities with social bookmarking than with indexing. I also have some concerns about the the potential for online mobbing and bullying using tags. In settings such as Facebook or Flickr, I worry that our students may succumb to the temptation to be cruel. On a more positive note, I can see benefits for persons with "orphaned" academic interests. I wrote my undergraduate thesis ( a long time ago in a land far away) on Edward Blyden and the work of the Southern Baptist Convention in Liberia in the nineteenth century. My research would have been much speedier if I could have leveraged the knowledge of my "social mob" to track down references to Blyden, the SBC or missionaries to Liberia. Still I cannot see bookmarking serving as an adequate substitute for research. I spent most of my time in the archives of the SBC in Richmond reading through correspondence. If the letters had been "tagged", I would have missed a lot of useful information because herding might have led some taggers to categorize a letter as "evangelism" where I might be looking for competing cosmogonies, theodicy, soteriology...I worry that tagging lends itself to reductionism and that complex social phenomena might be misunderstood or mis-categorized.