In which I am addicted
I’ve just spent the last half hour reorganizing my Picassa files, my notebooks, and my feeds; and I’ve come to the shocking conclusion that I am generating nowhere near enough metadata. I find myself frantically trolling the interwebs for marginal content that I can, in turn, organize. Only 7 major feeds? Only 5 notebook headings? I can still organize my Miro video’s by genre? Gott in Himmel! I must be failing in my citizenly duties!
This drive to categorize, and track, and tag seems to me a blessing and a curse. In a distributed information society it becomes every individuals role to be a keeper of content, and in turn to be held responsible, not for, but to that content. Sort of the whole ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ scenario. Except that in this instance the responsibility is both personal and distributed. An aspect of ourselves becomes the patina that we have added to other’s content.
I’m curious to see if this sort of trend will reach a sort of ludditic critical mass of overstimulated technophiles. Will there be a rebuttal of content? Tagging for the sake of tagging alone?
If you’ll excuse me, I have to start in on my music collection…
No related posts.
You think you got it bad I spent the day adding patches to my smart-phone (not sure if that’s an oxymoron) to be able to synchronize my phone with all my G-ware so I can continue to pseudo-organize my life (content) when I’m away from the computer. Of course you know how much crap I have.
My OCD indulgence of this week has been to collect .pdf docs. of great philosophers and any related articles about them. It’s like going to Borders with a shopping cart and no is looking. You take the whole section and walk out.
heh. This is why I still rely on my intricate hierarchy of post-its, and have thus far resisted getting a blackberry.
I think the interesting thing is that the level of complexity of the systems we use to organize content may one day come to rival the complexity of the information that they were intended to organize. Would this make them redundant? or would it yield yet another level of hierarchy?
…I should start an online support group for Google addicts. But I’m afraid most of my time would be spent organizing and categorize the addicts into groups. Then I would move on to the abundance of online content that I could collect, tag and sort into groups with subgroups…thus defeating the purpose…errr.