Folksonomy

The Blogosphere, as Veronica suggests, is an important contribution to social inclusion and harmony, and that’s why we’re employing blogging here on a therapeutic basis. I discuss it in my book if anyone would like to follow up this idea. It’s called Talkin’ to Your Heart: The Dialogic Resolution of Antisociality—we have it in the Centre’s library.

And the Blogosphere shares that anarchist mentality that Ms Hart mentions. Let me tell you now about ‘folksonomy’. ‘Taxonomy’ is the old science of classifying things; folksonomy is new. It’s about how you yourself see the world and arrange it. Not how you’ve been told to classify it by ‘experts’. Different cultures—different individuals even—see the world in different ways, and in the past a dominant elite has tried to impose their way of seeing onto everyone else in order to control them. It’s what we call ‘a discourse of power’. Now that ordering has been taken out of the hands of the elite and made open to the people. You can just label things how you like, group items together according to your intuition or your emotional intelligence instead of being dictated to by bullying elitists who claim to know more than you do. So it’s about identity too—we’re all searching for a sense of identity, and folksonomy lets you create your own. In this new world there’s respect for Multiple Intelligences: people are born with different but equally valuable abilities; no-one is stupid. Anarchist folksonomy respects everyone’s separate identity and the way they differently perceive and construct their world.

Back in the eighteenth century a whole new way of thinking came about. Man—and it was ‘man’; there was no room for women!—were at the centre of the universe. Nature, religion, imagination, and emotion were all mocked and despised. All the things that make you individual and different—your culture, your identity—was submerged under the grand notion of Universal Mankind. Nature was just there to be exploited. Progress was everything; science could conquer the universe. Terrible crimes were committed in the name of these proud, boastful ideas. It was called ‘The Enlightenment’ and there’s never been a more misleading term. Now folksonomy is a rejection of the old arrogances of Enlightenment thought and is the language of the new, social network.