Memory & links

Memory is sometimes thought of a filing system. However all our memories appear to be connected with each other. Many techniques that aim to improve recall do so by establishing connections between new items to be remembered and those we know well already. I'm a bit unconvinced by most metaphors between the brain and the internet but this one interests me. It implies that our techniques for memory retrieval are a little Googlesque. It's the links that matter, baby. It triggers a fantasy of sentient memes trying to optimize their rankings in our brains so they are made to stick. It's all about the connections.

We tend to forget that remembering is an act of reconstruction. The file does not come out of the system in one piece. We must rebuild events from fragments. Depending on context, we may view fragments is a positive or negative light. These multiple, continuous reconstructions contrast with our image of our lives as a single, autobiographical thread. Instead there's a collage (tapestry seems rather too ordered) of small pieces, loosely joined. A world held together by emotional tags. OurStory is an interesting experiment but I would prefer an "OurStories", something mashed and multiple, consistently inconsistent. Social software as Rashomon. What would you tag?

Tag State

Jack has pointed me towards this Thomas van der Wal article on the state of tagging. The more I see it, the more I get interested in tagging. From what I can see, tagging has 3 primary uses:

1. Retrieval

The first and the most obvious. Do it, tag it, lose it, find it. This is primarily a personal activity and it doesn't require that you share your tags with anyone else. Tagging is therefore part of Personal Information Management

2. Sensemaking

So what happens when people share their tags with others? If they have some nifty analytic or visualisation software, it allows us to see what the informationscape of a team, a department, an organisation looks like. The world becomes cloudy. Folksonomies can be created that feedback into official taxonomies. Rather than tell people about ourselves in LinkedIn or Facebook profiles, we can expose ourselves through our tag scapes. Whole new vistas of investigation & deception become possible. Do we tag something because we think it's interesting or because we want to other people to think that we think that it's interesting?

3. Sharing & Flexible Workflow

So MentorNet mashes up with Flickr. The movement of images is facilitated by tagging. Metadata isn't just for finding stuff but making it move, picking it up and dropping it somewhere else. If it's findable, it's mashable. The lowest level of mashability is the level at which we can tag. First page, then image, then pixel.

We don't have the supernatural anymore, just metadata...