December 28, 2006: On Tags

I was glad to see Yahoo! 360° introduce a tagging feature for blog entries. Given that I cannot really count on the Search tool for anything useful, tagging is the next best thing. Readers may even recall that I started experimenting with using Flickr for the images I was incorporating in order to tag those images (many of which were not photographs). However, once I hit the maximum number of images I was able to store without charge, I decided that I was not getting enough benefit to justify paying for an upgrade. So over the last couple of days I have been adding tags to all of my blog entries, drawing upon the tags I had assigned to the images where appropriate; and, so far at least, I have been relatively satisfied with the results. (Among other things, they helped me to find the proper destination for the above hyperlink!)

Having said all that, however, I should make it clear that these are my own tags for my own use purposes. I do not expect them to be of much use to anyone else unless I tell someone to look at a collection of entries associated with a specific tag. In this respect I subscribe to one of Wittgenstein's fundamental precepts: Words only convey meaning in the context of how they are used. I know my own contexts of use well enough to use my own tags; but I doubt that any amount of my reading of anyone else's texts will provide me with a use-model that will allow me to negotiate that persons tags for my own use-purposes. To put this another way (and draw upon a past discussion), tags are a highly impoverished "solution" (which is why I am using scare quotes) to the problem of description. This is because, at the end of the day, description is most effective if it is recognized and rendered as a literary form, far more subtle than we tend to take it to be. We tend to associate description at its best with well-written fiction; but, to reflect on a recent discussion, the well-edited review is also, by its very nature, an excellent example of good descriptive writing. My great fear is that our increased immersion in the use of "rich media" may eventually erode the talent of skilled literary description, and we may be left with little more than increasingly sophisticated tagging systems. This will erode not only our literary capabilities but our very capacity to make ourselves understood.