Folksonomy & the Folks

 Michelle Scarr

Folksonomy & the Folks

The constant rise of amateur lead of posting has certainly not devaluated the content of the professional writers in the world. However, the internet has made the finding of information in some way easier to find and in other ways harder to find reputable information. It seems that anything that we need to know we can simply google and find an answer in literally one second, definitions of words, current events, and pictures of actors. In that one second that it takes to search, pages and pages of information appears with thousands and thousands of sources for those few select words that you searched. 

As you know, you can find all of those sources in seconds but which ones do you actually chose to cite a paper or simply to become knowledgeable on a topic? This is a way where finding information is considerably harder nowadays. In the earlier decades before, in order to research, people would go to the library and search through encyclopedias, dictionaries, and atlases. Now since, the internet is available to all people and we, as Americans, possess the right of free speech, Americans can post whatever ever they want about whatever they want. 

People post opinions, comments from facebook, photos, music, videos. People post just about every medium. The people and the mediums make up the medium that is the internet. We, as Americans, live in a democracy both in reality and virtually. We have the freedom of speech and of the press. This applies to all types of medias and mediums. We can print in newspapers, magazine, give speeches to our liking, and especially establish websites, domain names, and social networking accounts. The democracy that rules the online would gives us the power to post anything including graphics, pictures, text, etc. that we desire on the internet for everyone to read. 

Folksonomy is defined as a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy). Before the internet, a system such as the Dewey Decimal System was considered Folksonomy. It gives people the ability to search something by a certain category for easy researching access. The common process of Folksonomy has slightly changed once the internet became popular around the world. Now, when someone refers to folksonomy , they are usually referring to the concept of “tagging”. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html) 

Tagging something online is relating an image, a blog, a video, etc. to certain words or phrases. If the certain words or phrases are tagged to an article, for instance, once they are searched on a website or via search engine, the image will appear as one of the results. For example, if you type in “Mumford and Sons” into youtube, different songs by Mumford and Sons will appear, ones with lyrics, live performances, and talk shows featuring Mumford and Sons will appear in the result page of youtube. In databases such as ProQuest, you are able to search a topic, sentence, or word and articles with those same words tagged will appear on your results page. As you can see, this type of Folksonomy proves itself very useful in ways of the internet, if it didn’t exist how would we search topics and find information about them. It can be compared to a new fashioned, global Dewy Decimal System.

The folksonomy of tagging articles can get researchers into trouble as well. Here is where the lines between opinions and facts can most certainly be blurred. You can type a word into google in order to look for its definition. Thousands of results will pop up, but what sources are actually accurate. People must dissect their sources before they choose one to cite. People can define a word in a blog, they can write about what that word means to them, people can post different definitions of words, and it is the researcher’s job to sift through the validity of the site to ensure the truth of its content. For instance, one can easily be directed to Urbanidictionary.com. This a website which people can post their own definitions no matter how crude or offensive. Someone can obviously tell that that website is not reliable but some are harder to distinguish. 

In order for one to validate the accuracy of a source, one should investigate the author, the sponsor of the website, the date the webpage was made, and even the web address itself. If the site ends with a .gov or a .org, it is most likely legit. Dot com sites prove to be less reliable. When you consider the amount of facebook users in the world (500 million), it is hard to distinguish what is fact or opinion. Though it can be difficult, to determine professional sources in a virtual democracy, it can be done. Therefore, the fact that people’s opinions are on display on the internet does not affect the validity of the sources that are professional and scholarly.