Tagging is the latest internet tech crazy, and it’s rapidly changing how people organize and relate to information. The thinking behind it, however, is anything but new. It’s simply a formalized approach to what people have always done – focus on what’s important to them and their lives.

By now, even the most non-technical web surfer has at least heard of websites like del.icio.us or Flickr. What these sites do is allow you to categorize web content in a way that makes the most sense to you. If you like a particular website or photo, you can save it and add a tag to it. A tag is more or less a keyword that describes the content in a way that’s as idiosyncratic as you need it to be. You can describe something in the way that’s the easiest for you to remember, and personalize it however you want.

In computer geek-speak, the popular term for this style of organizing information is “folksonomy.” It’s a play on the word taxonomy, which is the more formal hierarchical system of organization most of us have been taught to use with computers. You navigate any time you go to a shopping website, and drill down through sub-category after sub-category to find a particular item you’re interested in. Besides the hierarchical structure, taxonomies are typically provided in a top-down fashion. A site designer (or information architect) will create the taxonomy used to classify products on a site. Users of that site then have to conform to this system of organization to find what they are looking for. A folksonomy on the other hand is organized from the bottom-up. People who use the information all the time are the ones who determine how it’s organized. Rather than choosing from a drop-down list of pre-defined categories and sub-categories, a website like del.icio.us or Flickr allows users to tag items with pretty much any word that makes sense to them.

Wikipedia’s entry on folksonomy has a good basic explanation here as well:

In contrast to top-down, authoritative systems of formal taxonomy, folksonomic categories may strike those of a formal turn of mind as hopelessly idiosyncratic, but therein lies their value: a folksonomic category arises from an individual’s engagement with the tagged content, such that the created category is simultaneously personal, social, and (to some degree) systematic, in an imperfect and provisional way.

Folksonomies therefore convey information on multiple levels, including information about the people who create them, and they therefore invite human engagement. If you agree with somebody’s classification scheme, no matter how bizarre it might seem to others, you are subtly but strongly encouraged to explore other objects that this user has tagged.

And I like this distinction made by Anselm Hook in a Salon article:

“Tags let people do things by voluntary organization, not what a scientist says or what some organization has done to classify things. It’s a much more folksy, grass-roots application.”

I’ve been focusing on these concepts a lot lately as I gear up again with learning new tech stuff after a year or two long hiatus. I’ve always been interested in information architecture and how people construct meaning for themselves, and this whole idea of folksonomy is realy what drew me back into these realms. As techno-babbly as this might sound to some people, I think there’s a very important way that all this stuff intersects with religion and Pop Occulture. It really all clicked for me recently when I read this recent news item on an ABC news affiliate:

Drug Dealers See Mexico Folk Hero As Saint

BAKERSFIELD, California (AP) - A bandit out of Mexican folklore has become a patron saint to many drug dealers in this California city, and some even have altars to the Robin Hood-like character in their homes, authorities say. Jesus Malverde is known as the “narco saint” by many law enforcement officers and drug dealers.

His existence has never been verified, but legends claim that Malverde was caught and hanged as a thief in the early 20th century before he began appearing to people in peril to save them.

Up to 80 percent of Mexican nationals involved in the Bakersfield drug trade have Malverde’s likeness on a personal item, police Detective Pete Cavazos estimated.

“It protects the drug dealer and brings good luck to the drug dealer,” Cavazos was quoted as telling the The Bakersfield Californian. “It might sound comical to others, but they take it very, very seriously.”

Mexicans have a way of creating “saints out of figures who give them a glimmer of hope in their everyday lives,” said Richard T. Rodriguez, an English and Latino studies professor at the University of Illinois.

Mexican and Central American folk saints have been an interest of mine for a while now. What I find fascinating about them is how they spring up among the people who need them most. Because of this, they also have a very tenuous relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. Folk saints like Jesus Malverde or La Santisima Muerte or the Corte Maladandra do not fit into the nice neat categories the very traditional and hierarchically-minded Church adheres to. It represents people taking religion into their own hands, and re-organizing it in a way that makes sense to them and to their lives, instead of some priest, distant pope, or centuries-old Church council. In a way, these folk saints represent a sort of “religious tagging”, the folksonomy of faith.

Many of these figures celebrate criminals, outlaws, even the archetype of death itself. Like Jesus, who consorted with prostitutes, tax collectors, criminals, cripples and socially undesirable elements, these folk saints dissolve social boundaries and re-combine psychic energy in a way that’s directly relevant to people’s lives. Even though they are extremely popular, the Church won’t recognize them - even tries to stamp out belief in them in some places - because it subverts the hierarchy and value-system of the Church. You can see this cultural tension very readily by how often news stories about Mexican folk saints (and there are an increasing number lately I’ve noticed) focus on applying words “drug dealers,” “narcotics,” or “criminals.” While all that may be true, it overlooks and demonizes the vast majority of normal people who find a source of religious comfort in their non-canonical non-hierarchical figures.

Fortunately for us, our bastions of cultural power - corporations - are quickly becoming aware of the power of folk saints, or rather of folksonomy. They are rapidly realizing that if you listen to people, and give them a chance to tell you what’s important in their lives, that everyone benefits. And thus we see the meteoric rise of sites like del.icio.us or Flickr or their bazillion imitators. Everyone is scrambling to reconfigure how their sites and technology works to tackle the new challenges and opportunities that exist around simply allowing people to find and describe meaning in their own lives and according to their own terms - or tags.

For more information on this topic, try out these web resources: