Taxonomies have been much in the news recently. Laughingmeme, for example:
complex hierarchies of information suffer from many of the same problems that hierarchies in general suffer from, in particular they're brittle. They adapt poorly as your domain/interests evolves and shifts, and lack the flexibility to deal with decision making/knowledge creation in diverse environments. ... Whether it is easier or harder for an individual to maintain their personal information systems as opposed to organisations/networks really depends on the individual.
Clay Shirky wrote: 'No hierarchy I have a hard time as seeing as inherently problematic — hierarchy is good for creating non-overlapping but all-inclusive buckets. In a file-system world-view, both of those are desirable characteristics, but in a web world-view, where objects have handles rather than containment paths, neither characteristic is necessary. Thus multiple tags “skateboarding tricks movie” allows for much of the subtlety but few of the restrictions of hierarchy. If hierarchy was a good way to organize links, Yahoo would be king of the hill and Google an also-ran service. There is a loss in folksonomies, of course, but also gain, so the question is one of relative value. Given the surprising feedback loop — community creates folksonomy, which helps the community spot its own concerns, which leads them to invest more in folksonomies — I expect the value of communal categorization to continue to grow.'
What Alex Wright had to say struck me as true through and through:
What irks me about some of the dialogue to date is an assumption (usually implied) that networked systems are somehow inherently more "fair" than top-down systems. Democracy, like unregulated free markets, are no guarantee of fairness. And while networked systems surely give users more opportunity for input, they also abide by power laws which, though perhaps ineluctable, are neither equal nor fair (especially insofar as they favor early adopters). Top-down systems, while seemingly authoritarian, may paradoxically do a better job of defending the interests of the individual. Just as mob rule is no way to run a country, so purely democratic classifications could lead lead to groupthink, favoring conformity and marginalizing dissent. ... I don't believe that top-down and bottom-up systems necessarily have to stand in opposition; the two models may ultimately prove consilient.
He quotes Kevin Kelly and this clip has introduced me to, and convinced me that I must read, Out of Control (see here for a summary):
In the human management of distributed control, hierarchies of a certain type will proliferate rather than diminish. That goes especially for distributed systems involving human nodes - such as huge global computer networks. Many computer activists preach a new era in the network economy, an era built around computer peer-to-peer networks, a time when rigid patriarchal networks will wither away. They are right and wrong. While authoritarian "top-down" hierarchies will retreat, no distributed system can survive long without nested hierarchies of lateral "bottom-up" control. As influence flows peer to peer, it coheres into a chunk - a whole organelle - which then becomes the bottom unit in a larger web of slower actions. Over time a multi-level organization forms around the percolating-up control: fast at the bottom, slow at the top.Last word to Kevin Kelly:
The law is concise: Distributed control has to be grown from simple local control. Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.
