nicotra / “folksonomy” and the restructuring of writing

Jodie Nicotra

“Folksonomy” and the Restructuring of Writing

Space

Metaphors that posit writing as linear, essayistic, and the province of a single author
no longer fit the dynamic, newly spatialized practices of composition occurring on and
via the Web. Using “folksonomy,” or multi-user tagging, as an example of one of these
practices, this article argues for a new metaphor for writing that encapsulates how
writing emerges spatially from dynamic, collective subjectivities in a network.

“W riting,” as Johndan Johnson-Eilola reminds us, “has always been about

making connections: between writer and readers, across time, and through
space” (“Negative” 17). Even in the most traditional print-based forms of writ-
ing—operations like citing, quoting, and paraphrasing—connect the writer’s
own thoughts and ideas to a larger web of other texts and ideas. So the idea that
writing is about making connections is nothing new. What is new, perhaps, is
the visibility that these connections have gained in the decade since the advent
and explosive proliferation of the World Wide Web and other communication
technologies. As a result, traditional definitions of writing as a discrete tex-
tual object produced for a definable audience by a single individual or group
of individuals working in concert have become constrictive, to say the least.

CCC 61:1 / september 2009

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Writing conceived in the “narrowest scriptural sense,” as Collin Brooke recently

put it, has long felt limited, both in terms of what we think of as a text and our
sense of the possibilities for communication. This conception also inevitably
informs what we do in the classroom—that is, what we teach our students
to unconsciously value as writing, and what we don’t. Chances are that even
though a teacher may be aware of the limitations of what Lester Faigley and
Susan Romano call “essayistic literacy,” owing to administrative constraints,
student resistance, or lack of technological resources, knowledge, or training,
she or he will inevitably end up teaching these linear, traditional forms anyway.
But in the past decade, given the explosion of different and wholly unexpected
forms of communication that have been made possible by a range of new tech-
nologies (especially wireless ones) that still reach an apex of complexity on the
Web, the chorus of voices calling for a much-expanded definition of writing
has become even louder and more insistent.
In this article I examine one of these new, emergent forms of communica-
tion, dubbed “folksonomy” by the group of information architects who first
noticed and began discussing it. Folksonomy (a portmanteau of the words
folk and taxonomy), more commonly known as “multi-user tagging,” provides
a new technology for organizing material on the Web, one that moves away
from traditional hierarchies and classification systems. It also disrupts the idea
of single authorship of the type criticized by the theorists mentioned above by
showing how multiple, collective subjectivities “write,” enabling possibilities
for configurations and systems to emerge as a result of activity of the so-called
hive mind that could not have been anticipated or conceived of by an individual
author working alone.

1. Problematics: What Is “Writing”?

When an accepted definition of a concept no longer corresponds with the cir-
cumstances, it limits or constricts the field of possibility in which that definition
is operational. Such a constriction seems to be happening right now in the field
of writing. Conversely, a new or expanded sense of a concept, as Edward Schi-
appa suggests, “changes not only recognizable patterns of linguistic behavior,
but also our understanding of the world and the attitudes and behaviors we
adopt toward various parts of the world” (32). In asking the question “what is
writing?” then, I’m interested less in the question of essences (“what is it re-
ally?”) than in the rhetorical prospects of expanding the concept (“what does
the current definition enable or prevent?”). Thus, though we are not interested
in redefining “writing” once and for all, what gets counted as “writing” makes

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a difference to what we study as a field, what we teach in writing classrooms,

and how we conceive of writing programs.
Recent attempts to redefine writing have focused on expanding the con-
ceptual framework that currently identifies “writing” as the act of producing
a discrete textual object. These new definitions of writing highlight the fact
that writing itself is a technology, and they take into consideration acts that
previously would not have traditionally been considered “writing” so much as
classifying, connecting, or providing metadata about information. For example,
in her keynote address to the 2005 Computers and Composition conference,
Andrea Lunsford called for a more expansive and dynamic definition of writing,
arguing that “It is as though our old reliable rhetorical triangle of writer, reader,
and message is transforming itself before our eyes, moving from three discrete
angles to a shimmering, humming, dynamic set of performative relationships”
(170). In Lunsford’s estimation, writing is no longer a directed, specific perfor-
mance of a single kind of scriptural action, but rather is more broadly defined as

[a] technology for creating conceptual frameworks and creating, sustaining, and
performing lines of thought within those frameworks, drawing from and expanding
on existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs and symbols, incorporating
materials drawn from multiple sources, and taking advantage of the resources of
a full range of media. (171)

Arguably, the last two-thirds of Lunsford’s redefinition of writing represent

what happens in even the most traditional forms of writing: using signs and
symbols, incorporating materials from multiple sources, and using a full
range of media. (One need only think of how the formal technical report—the
cornerstone assignment of most technical writing courses—fulfills all three
of these criteria.) The novelty of Lunsford’s definition lies in its attempt to
create a new metaphor for writing. To modify traditional and still-dominant
notions of writing as static and linear, Lunsford calls for a metaphor that is
both more dynamic (performative) as well as spatial: writing in this redefinition
is a technology for creating “conceptual frameworks” that create and channel
thought in particular ways.
Like Lunsford, Johnson-Eilola, among the first in the field to theorize hy-
pertext’s implications for traditional notions of writing, wants to do away with
the narrow definition of writing as a specific act of a single author producing
a text. Indeed, as Johnson-Eilola argues in another essay, the larger economic
sphere has fulfilled the work done by poststructuralist theorists and others in
making the idea of a self-willed, autonomous producer obsolete. The type of

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worker valued in today’s economy possesses the ability to “become-DJ”—that

is, to be able to find and draw from disparate cultural aspects, remix them,
and spin them in a different way.1 To think about the ways in which writing
has changed, Johnson-Eilola draws on labor theorist Robert Reich’s notion
that the most significant economic force in recent years has been not produc-
ers (and unquestioning submitters to authority valued by the manufacturing
economy) but “symbolic analysts,” who as workers “are valued for their abil-
ity to understand both users and technologies, bringing together multiple,
fragmented contexts in an attempt to broker solutions” (“Database” 201). The
symbolic-analytic subjectivity described by Johnson-Eilola can be easily applied
to communication writ more broadly. In terms of recognizably communica-
tion-oriented aspects of the Web, for example, blogs are one obvious form of
symbolic-analytic writing—they cull bits of information from the Web and
reorder them in a hypertexted, semi-narrative format for a more-or-less defined
audience and purpose. Bloggers (whether they produce a single-authored blog
or contribute to a multi-authored one) thus act as aggregator-DJs, compiling
and linking sources from all over the Web in a way that provides readers with
instant access to a network of other voices and texts. Though bloggers still
serve what Foucault calls an “author-function” insofar as information is gath-
ered, compiled, and synthesized into a type of narrative under the auspices of
a single blog title, clearly this author-function is different in kind from that of
traditional, print-based texts.
What differentiates Web-based writing like blogging from traditional
print-based writing is mostly a question of materiality. Scholars from Walter
Ong to Jay David Bolter have discussed the changes in literacy practices that
have been wrought by changes in the material technologies of literacy: from
orality to writing, from writing to print, from print to digital media. Anne
Wysocki writes, “part of what has changed the warp and woof that used to seem
so steady underneath us is precisely that we are now aware of the warp and
woof, that we are aware of the complex weaves of writing as a material practice”
(2). Arguably, the digital technologies of new media merely amplify what the
process of knowledge production has been all along. Though perhaps we tried
to characterize knowledge production as a linear, controlled, argument-driven
process, in actuality it always has been a deeply intuitive, affectively driven
process of recombination and reorganization. Practices like blogging make
this DJ process of “remixing” even more apparent.
But Johnson-Eilola also calls attention to what he calls “two primary forms
of online writing” that certainly stretch the boundaries of traditional defini-

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tions of writing: namely, database and Web search engine design (“Database”
218). The idea that a technology designed to help people search for informa-
tion on the Web counts as a form of writing might come as a surprise; indeed,
as Johnson-Eilola points out, to most people in rhetoric and composition
these technologies are more or less invisible as forms of communication and
so are “[ceded] to computer programming and computer engineering” (218).
Certainly, the computer programmers and engineers who design these search
engines have to rely on the usual toolbox of rhetorical concepts, including the
most traditional tools of audience and situation. As Johnson-Eilola writes, “the
space of a search engine screen has itself been painstakingly designed, with
various sections written to satisfy an extremely large number of audiences. . . .
And, as with traditional texts, the writers have thought very hard about their
audience, addressing them, persuading them, moving them” (218). People don’t
typically think of searching and organizing information as creative acts, but
more as a means for sorting through a collection of objects that already exists.
Databases and search engines may be extreme cases, but they show the extent
of Johnson-Eilola’s desire for a conception of writing that accounts for the new
formations that have emerged on the Web. In a brief and informal blurb (part of
a Computers and Composition “Town Hall” section, Johnson-Eilola offers a clear
and succinct response to his own question “What is writing?” Like Lunsford’s
redefinition of writing, his answer attempts to get away from the traditional
and persistent definition of an individual producing a textual artifact: “WRIT-
ING AS THE RECURSIVE, SHARED, (AND SOMETIMES ABSCONDED WITH)
COORDINATION OR BUILDING OF SPACES AND FIELDS. In other words,
writers are not individuals (or even groups) who produce texts, but participants
within spaces who are recursively, continually, restructuring those (and other)
spaces” (“Writing” 1; emphasis his). “Writing” in this definition certainly has
an expansive, performative aspect—not only is it “shared,” as in produced by
multiple users, but it is conceived of as the building of a space rather than the
production of a text.

2. Finding Oneself in Space (Digital Rhetoric and the Problem

of “Findability”)
The idea that new writing technologies, especially digital ones, would rely on
the idea of space as a metaphor may be unsurprising—it is, after all, called
“cyberspace.” But the shift in metaphor has significant consequences both for
how we see writing and for what we fail to see. As George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson argue in their influential text Metaphors We Live By (and as Lakoff

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discusses elsewhere), far from being “mere” rhetorical flourishes, metaphors

form the very basis of language and human thought processes. As we speak, so
we believe, and as we believe, so we act. What’s more, the dominant metaphor
for a concept tends to preempt other possibilities for seeing the concept (Lakoff
and Johnson 10). Thus, evidence that the metaphor for writing is shifting from
one that is linear and time-bound (i.e., process) to one that is more spatial or
architectural signals profound differences in the possibilities for imagining
how we think and how we act vis-à-vis writing.
The metaphorical concept of “writing as space” has spurred scholars in
rhetoric and composition to attend to space as a force that affects the produc-
tion, effects, and reception of writing. Just as changes in the material technolo-
gies and media of writing or speech served to expose the fact that writing or
speech always takes place via material technologies or a medium, a change in
the space in which communication takes place calls attention to space as a fac-
tor that affects communication. Consequently, a number of books and articles
on “spatial rhetorics”—or, as an online compendium of sources related to the
topic titles it, “Rhetorics of Space, Place, Mobility, Situation” (Howard)—have
recently emerged. In her Geographies of Writing, for instance, Nedra Reynolds
claims that though much attention has been given to the temporal aspects
of writing (such as those emphasized in studies of process pedagogy), our
postmodern era demands that we consider the spatial aspects of writing as
well—the where of writing as well as the why and the when. Attending to the
spatial aspects of writing, Reynolds suggests, will draw attention to “the sense
of place and space that readers and writers bring with them to . . . writing, to
navigating, arranging, remembering, and composing” (176). Part of the purpose
of her book is pedagogical, to “[teach] writing as a set of spatial practices not
unlike those we use in moving through the world” (3). While Reynolds attends
to the way that space and geography inform our writing practices, Jay David
Bolter considers writing itself as a space. In his book Writing Space, Bolter
remarks upon the growing resonance of spatial metaphors since the advent of
hypertext and the redistribution or rethinking of space it made possible. Bolter
names our current hypertextual, digital era “the late age of print” (2), arguing
that this era (like Jameson’s idea of “late capitalism,” from which the concept
was borrowed) marks a transformation of our social and cultural attitudes,
in this case, toward print itself. Cultural and technological forces converge in
what Bolter calls “writing space,” which he defines as “a material and visual
field, whose properties are determined by a writing technology and the uses
to which that technology is put by a culture of readers and writers” (12). Writ-

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ing space is more than a neutral, passive background against which rhetorical
production happens—rather, it is built by a recursive social process, by which it
enables certain forms of rhetorical production, and is also configured by them.
If virtual space is the new type of rhetorical space, then what are some of
its characteristics? Contrary to concepts of space as a “container” that can hold
communication, or as a something that exists prior to a writer’s entry into it,
virtual space does not preexist the introduction of new elements to the network.
Rather, through any of their interactions with the network, the users themselves
help to configure and build the space. One might say that this has always been
the case with writing and speech situations—that is, that the rhetorical space
was created simultaneously with the occasion of speaking. However, in more
traditional rhetorical forms, the active creation of rhetorical space was obscured
to a certain extent by the conventionalizing of the rhetorical occasion and
place. Classical orators spoke in the law courts or the agora; preachers speak
in the pulpit; newspapers at least appear to provide an already constituted and
available space for opinion and editorial writing (though we know, of course,
that forces are at work to make this forum available to only certain types of
writers—that is, the rhetorical “space” is not neutral).2 The nature of the Web,
though, makes it obvious that its space is materially different—as a network,
no space preexists, but needs to be created.
A network’s success depends on having a critical mass of users to both
create and upload information and to interact with it (such interactions may
include operations like linking and commenting). Networks are governed by
Metcalfe’s Law, which states that “the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals
the square of the number of users. In other words, the value of networked sys-
tems (i.e., telephone, fax, email, the Web) grows exponentially as the user popu-
lation increases in a linear manner” (Morville 65). The more users participate
in the site, both adding to it and commenting on the objects that other people
have added, the richer and denser—and hence more valuable—the network
becomes. The qualitative character of networks changes with the number of
connections, and hence the space is built and changed as more and more users
add material (or nodes) and interact with it by creating links, and so on. Or, to
put it a different way (namely, Johnson-Eilola’s), networks are simply another
name for the recursive, collective, building of conceptual spaces or fields: that
is, writing.
Conceiving of the spatial aspects of writing brings with it a concomitant
attention to the rhetorical canon of arrangement. The equivalent of half a
million Libraries of Congress has been added in the past several years to the

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general infosphere, mostly in the form of amateur publications: blogs, wikis,

Web pages, music and multimedia files, emails, social networking sites, and so
on. Along with this algorithmic increase in the amount of information comes
the problem of organizing it—after all, information is not useful, at least for
the purposes of knowledge production, until the information is arranged in
the system in such a way that it means something to somebody. In his book
Ambient Findability, information architect Peter Morville argues that what
is most important in the contemporary information era is not authorship so
much as finding and being found, concepts that rely on space and location as
a metaphor. Morville defines “findability” as “a quality that can be measured at
both the object and system levels” (4). That is, an individual object must have
characteristics that make it findable (like the bright orange of a lifejacket),
and the system also needs to be set up so that it can be navigated and so users
can find what they need. In other words, an individual can create an extremely
well-laid-out, usable, and attractive Web site, but if nobody can find it (that
is, if your ideas of what the site is about don’t match up to others’ ideas) it is
essentially useless, a rhetorical failure. Now more than ever the focus is much
more on the organization of the total network than on the individual producer
of texts. This interest in what we may loosely call the “context” (or, perhaps
more accurately, the “ecology”) of information may not be new—however, the
sheer amount of information with which we’re dealing now and the medium
in which it primarily occurs has perhaps given the importance of organization
over individual authorship a heightened intensity. Thus, the issue of findability
is an important one for contemporary rhetoric and composition.
This problem of organizing information has been acknowledged as an is-
sue since at least 1945, when Vannevar Bush, an information scientist working
for IBM, called for a new scientific program after the end of WWII. In his article
“As We May Think,” Bush argued that the methods of sorting and organizing
what he called the “growing mountain of research” in increasingly specialized
scientific areas were pathetically inadequate for the task (1). Reminding readers
that Gregor Mendel’s nineteenth-century genetic research was lost for twenty
years because it failed to reach the right hands, Bush warned that similar ca-
tastrophes would be bound to happen “as truly significant attainments become
lost in the mass of the inconsequential” (1). Crucial to preventing the replica-
tion or effective loss of information would be the development of a system that
could accomplish the feat of organizing, sorting, and digesting information,
one that could make all of this information functionally available to its users.
What Bush dreams up in “As We May Think” is a complicated mecha-

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nism called a “memex” that would allow an individual to physically record

her own associative thought processes as she moved through and categorized
large quantities of information. Bush’s idea for the memex was based on his
assumption that the human mind does not work in the hierarchical, logical
ways implicit in traditional classification systems. Rather, he says, “It operates
by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is
suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate
web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (4). Thus, the basis of the memex
is what Bush calls “associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision
whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically
another. . . . The process of tying two items together is the important thing” (4).
Using the memex, one could find information and build webs of knowledge.
When a user is researching a particular problem—say, for example, the history
and properties of the Turkish longbow—she can call up an item and “join” it
to a related item by means of a coding system, thus gradually building a trail
between various items relevant to the question.
The problems that Bush attempted to solve by inventing the memex
(a prototype of which was never actually produced) have to do with the or-
ganization of information, problems that still are evident today. Traditional
methods of sorting and classifying information rely on a handful of controllers,
who decide beforehand on a classification system and then insert each new
piece of information into that previously established system. For example, the
Dewey Decimal System, still the organizational system used by most libraries,
divides information into ten categories: Psychology and Philosophy, Religion
and Mythology, Social Sciences, and so on. Someone who wanted to find a
book on technology, gender, and society, for instance, would first have to think
about what category the system would place it under—would it be under the
Technology category or under Philosophy and Psychology? To use the system
effectively, the user would have to know the categories extremely well (or, al-
ternately, know how to use the services of a specialist in the system—namely,
a librarian) in order to find the item for which she was looking. But generally
speaking, the user has no control over the information or how it is organized
in a top-down, hierarchically organized classification system.
Another problem with top-down classification systems is that no mat-
ter how well the user learns the system’s categories, types of knowledge are
not universal, transcendental, or stagnant, but change continually based on
social and cultural factors. Though a supporter of the Dewey Decimal System
remarks on its “cleverness . . . in choosing decimals for its categories,” which

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“allows it to be both purely numerical and infinitely hierarchical” (Wikipedia,

“Dewey Decimal Classification”), the fact remains that it cannot anticipate all
the categories of information that might possibly arise. For instance, searching
under “folksonomy” or “metadata” on a library database inevitably turns up no
results because both of those keywords are too new to exist yet as categories of
information. Electronic library catalogues make doing subject searches much
easier, but the fact remains that institutions, being slow by nature, simply can’t
keep up with the pace of new information and types of knowledge.
Web search engines like Google, with its indexing and page-ranking sys-
tem, do address the problems of traditional classification systems to a certain
extent. However, while Google may be better at finding relevant pages for a user
query than other systems, it does have some significant limitations or blind
spots. One problem that Google and other search engines have is with discerning
what Morville calls the “aboutness” of a page (53). That is, sometimes a page
or a resource will have a social significance or meaning that isn’t necessarily
reflected in the content. For example, as the creator of the social bookmark-
ing site del.icio.us points out, the two most popular user tags to describe the
site Wikipedia.org are “free” and “reference,” neither of which appear on the
home page for Wikipedia to describe the site. Indeed, when I did a Google
search using the terms “free reference,” Wikipedia did not appear in the first
fifty search entries, over three times as many as most users will scroll down
through. Obviously, users see Wikipedia differently than it sees itself. And that
is where the social aspect of categorization comes in—others may see or use
your site or resource differently than you intended or expected it to be used.
Many have argued that the associative system made possible by Bush’s
hypothetical memex works better than traditional indexing systems because
it builds in an affective level to the classification—that is, the user’s own inter-
est. However, what the memex (and hypertext, for that matter) leaves out is
the possibility for social aspects of categorization. While memex users could
theoretically reproduce trails for insertion into other individual memexes, the
social aspect by necessity stays on a very limited scale because there’s no infra-
structure or network in place that can allow the social to multiply. This is the
benefit of a bottom-up, user-driven system of organization, at least according
to some information architects. As David Weinberger, an information philoso-
pher, metaphorically puts it, “The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is
perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge. Now autumn has come to the
forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital revolution” (“Taxonomies” 1). “Tree”
or hierarchical conceptions of knowledge and their associated organizational

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methods simply do not work as well when the space being organized is “flat,” as
information architects characterize the space of the Web (Udell). Thus, these
hierarchical methods of organization are gradually being supplanted on the
Web by new ways that rely on a more bottom-up method—or, as Weinberger
rephrases his tree metaphor in a different article, “The old way creates a tree.
The new rakes leaves together” (“Trees” 2). A new paradigm for organizing
information on the Web, called variously “folksonomy,” “ethnoclassification,”
or, more simply, “multi-user tagging,” illustrates Weinberger’s point about new
methods of organizing virtual space. In the past several years, folksonomy has
emerged as a type of home-grown solution for the problem of organization. But
more than the simple organization of information that’s already there, folkson-
omy also simultaneously spurs the production and addition of information to
the Web. The result has been a remarkable burst of creativity and rhetorical
production, the flourishing of a creative commons.

3. Collective Writing, Invention, and the Building of Conceptual

Space

Commons may be rare. They may evoke tragedies. They may be

hard to sustain. And at times, they certainly may interfere with
the efficient use of important resources.
But commons also produce
something of value. They are a resource for decentralized inno-
vation. They create the opportunity for individuals to draw upon
resources without connections, permission, or access granted by
others. They are environments that commit themselves to being
open. Individuals and corporations draw upon the value created
by this openness. They transform that value into other value,
which they then consume privately.
—Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas

The buzz about folksonomy as a new, bottom-up way of organizing informa-

tion on the Web first started among information architects, a group that is a
powerful and mostly invisible (for users) force both in how the Web is structured
and how online corporations can use that structure to drum up more business.
Part computer geek, part librarian, part business consultant, and part cultural
theorist, an information architect is perhaps the most prototypical example
of the symbolic-analytic workers discussed by Johnson-Eilola. The most well-
known information architects, including Thomas Vander Wal, Clay Shirky,
Louis Rosenfeld, and David Weinberger, have become virtual town criers of the

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Web, noticing and analyzing trends and developments long before the average
Web user does, and those who want to be in the know about the latest in Web
architecture make it a point to read their blogs regularly.
Vander Wal first coined the term “folksonomy” in an October 2004 blog
posting, following a discussion that began among information architects with
the February 2004 introduction of the beta version of Flickr, a photo-sharing
website started by Caterina Fake and her husband Stewart Butterfield. “Folk-
sonomy” referred specifically to Flickr’s built-in method for helping users to
organize their online photo collections by allowing them to assign lists of
“tags” or keywords to individual photos. Following the introduction of Flickr,
more sites that employed folksonomies as a method of organizing objects and
information quickly appeared, including del.icio.us (a site that allows users to
upload and tag their own and others’ bookmarks), CiteULike (a site for sharing
and categorizing academic papers), LibraryThing, SteveMuseum, 43 things,
and the enormously popular YouTube. Commercial sites like Amazon.com and
iTunes have jumped on the folksonomy bandwagon as well, recognizing that
allowing multiple users to attach their own tag to an object like a book or a
song increases the likelihood that someone searching the site for a particular
thing would find (and possibly buy) that object.
The idea of allowing multiple users to name or annotate the same set of
objects on the Web in order to create more efficient and effective searching is
generally attributed to Ben Shneiderman, a professor of computer science at
the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. For
the 2001 conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special
Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, Shneiderman set up kiosks
where members could tag any of 3,300 photos taken over the past twenty years
of meetings. Shneiderman used an application called Microsoft Access, which
allows users to type in keywords to the database and then drag and drop the
names of the people they recognized directly onto a photo. Later users could
then search for photos based on the dragged-and-dropped names. Flickr is
based on a similar idea, the difference being that instead of one person up-
loading photos into a database, an unlimited number of users can (in order to
manage the size of the site, however, users are limited as to how many photos
they can upload per month). On Flickr, photos can be searched and grouped
into photo streams by tags, and the site allows people designated by the user
as “friends” or “family” to add their own tags to photos.
Of course, sites that enable users to share photos with friends and family
aren’t that new; photo-processing sites like Snapfish and Shutterbug have en-

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abled people to share online photo sets for years before Flickr’s instantiation.
What makes Flickr different is that the tags added to photos create linkages
among large groups of individual users who otherwise would never have run
into each other. If I upload photos from my Iceland vacation, for instance, and
one of the tags I assign them is “Iceland,” those photos are instantly connected
to all the other photos on Flickr that bear the “Iceland” tag, including those by
Iceland natives and other tourists. (As of the writing of this article, a search on
the “Iceland” tag brought up over 103,000 photos.) Thus, as a Salon.com article
written shortly after the advent of Flickr pointed out:

The result is a dynamic environment, prone to all sorts of instant fads, created by
members inspiring each other to go in new directions with their cameras. It makes
digital photography not only instantly shareable, but immediately participatory,
creating collaborative communities around everything from the secret life of toys
to what grocery day looks like. The result is an only-on-the-Web conversation
where text and image are intermingled in a polyglot that has all the makings of a
new kind of conversation. (Mieszkowski, “Friendster” 1)

The conversational aspect of Flickr comes in because not only can users search
for all the photos on a particular tag, but the Flickr site also allows them to make
comments on photos, mark the photo as a “favorite,” add the user to a contact
list, and blog about the photos. Temporary communities emerge around par-
ticular photo streams or ideas and then fall apart. For instance, a temporary and
informal Flickr community sprang up around one user’s “squaring the circle”
idea, whereby round objects like flowers or wheels were framed in squares—this
started a temporary fad, as different users decided to try out the technique on
their own cameras. A more formally organized community group (community
groups bring together any user who is interested in a particular topic—users
don’t necessarily know each other) is called “A Day in the Life Of,” where group
members choose a date, post five photos that summarize their life that day, and
tag them with the initials DILO to mark their inclusion in the group.
Flickr is an example of what Vander Wal designates as a “narrow folkson-
omy,” where a single object is tagged by one or only a few users—hence, while
the tags would have value for that user and a small group of people associated
with him or her, they have less relevance for a wider group. By contrast, Vander
Wal designates sites that allow the same object (like the URL for a website, or
a book on Amazon or LibraryThing) to be tagged by multiple users as “broad
folksonomy.” In terms of effectiveness and meaning, Vander Wal says broad folk-
sonomies are better than narrow ones, because the more centralized a “node”

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(a site like de.licio.us, or Technorati, for example), the better it can aggregate
and syndicate information, and the more valuable it is for a user.
Tags, produced by multiple users, thus function as tools for invention.
While traditional rhetoric imagines invention as a process that occurs within
the mind of the rhetorical producer (perhaps in interaction with the world),
the process of invention through tagging results from interaction between
multiple users who are unknown to one another. Consider 43 things, for in-
stance, a folksonomy-based site that encourages its users to “Write down your
goals,” “Get Inspired,” and “Share your progress.” Users write down their goals
(which range from “love my body” and “have more free time,” to “Watch all
episodes of Mr. Bean ever made”) and provide updates of their progress. They
get support from other users in the form of “cheers,” (a website function that
links the cheerer’s page to the cheer-ee’s), advice, and consolations. But the
goals written down by users on 43 things also serve as a form of invention via
the site’s tag cloud—the more popular “things” to accomplish (i.e., the most
frequently assigned tags) appear in larger, bolder font. Tag clouds serve not
only as a record of what users have written, but they also serve to shape and
direct how goals are described, in a recursive process of invention. If a user
writes “running a marathon” as a goal, for instance, that user can see that four
thousand other people also have selected running a marathon as a goal. Users
tend to phrase goals as other people have phrased them so as to be included
in the community—so, for instance, one would not tend to write “running
26.2 miles” as one’s goal, because other members of the community would fail
to recognize it as a goal in which they’re interested. As Mieszkowski writes in
another Salon article,

Tags don’t have to be popular—you could use obscure words to tag all your in-
formation and end up with a secret language known only to you. But then your
data doesn’t get to play with everyone else’s. “The fact that you know that there
is a social aspect to this actually encourages you to pick tags that are relevant,”
says Technorati’s Dave Sifry. “It’s kind of like this invisible hand of positive social
pressure that results in something that’s much bigger than the person himself
could ever hope to achieve.” (“Steal” 3)

Howard Rheingold, a popular writer who investigates the social effects of new
technologies, talks in the same article about the connections that are estab-
lished between users and things through the process of tagging: “I look to see
who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think
are important. Then, I can look and see what else they’ve tagged. . . . And isn’t

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that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find
things that you find interesting and useful—and that multiplies your ability
to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off you”
(Mieszkowski, “Steal” 2).
In other words, in folksonomy invention is directly linked to the social in a
way that simply does not happen in the conception of invention in traditional,
essayistic literacy, that which consists of allowing one’s image of the audience
to guide or direct the kinds of claims, reasons, or examples that one uses. With
folksonomy, rhetorical agency and intention become much more complicated,
because invention is revealed as not simply the product of an individual, isolated
mind, but as a distributed process driven by the interaction of a multitude of
users. It becomes impossible to assign the origins of the invention to any one
individual; rather, invention emerges from a crowd, what Kevin Kelly (following
early twentieth-century entomologist William Morton Wheeler) calls the “hive
mind” (Kelly, Out 12). Users engaged in this process of creating, uploading, and
tagging Web objects (whether it’s videos they’ve created, digital photos, or a
website URL) are acting as “prosumers,” a term coined by Alvin Toffler in his
1980 book The Third Wave to describe a future consumer who doesn’t pas-
sively consume goods but participates in their creation in order to tailor them
more to individual tastes and desires. In terms of the Web, prosumption has
less to do with economic consumption than with acts of creative and rhetori-
cal production. The act of prosumption is particularly interesting for rhetoric
and composition because it rides the historically troublesome binary between
rhetorical production and hermeneutics, between “little” and “big” rhetoric;
the individuals who upload and tag videos on YouTube are both producing and
“reading” information. Kelly (who often casts himself in the role of techno-
prophet) writes, “The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more
deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned 10 years ago.
This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning
the sphere of social networking—smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative
action—into the main event” (“We Are” 1). Contrary to views of the Web that
say that it makes users into passive consumers of information, practices like
folksonomy spur rhetorical production. Folksonomy, especially the “broad”
folksonomy identified by Vander Wal, represents a truly collective form of
writing in that thousands of users are both creating and adding information
to the network (often prompted by a collective, recursive process of invention)
and organizing that information. In this nondirectional, bottom-up way, the
conceptual space that Johnson-Eilola identifies as writing gets built.

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Our habituated ways of thinking about and teaching writing are analo-
gous to a dress that no longer fits: it chafes and squeezes in the wrong places.
Though, as Doug Hesse argues, we need to “save a place for essayistic literacy”
(and certainly this kind of literacy shows no sign of abandoning us anytime
soon), linking the acts of prosumption and rhetorical production in which
our students already gleefully participate with what we teach as “writing” in
our composition classrooms will infuse a greater sense of relevance to what
we try to do as teachers of writing. Incorporating an awareness of folksonomy
and other “prosumption” practices into regular classroom practice can have
several transformational effects on students. First and most basically, it gives
us another way to make students aware that “composition” takes many forms
aside from what they typically think of as academic writing. Blog entries,
comments on someone else’s contribution, videos uploaded to YouTube, and
even photographs can all count as “compositions.” Second, through the actual
practice of tagging their contributions, students inevitably develop a keener
sense of audience awareness, because they must consider how people might
find, receive, and ultimately use the information that the student has con-
tributed. Finally, and most generally, attending to practices of non-essayistic
writing helps students develop what one might call a metacritical awareness.
Rather than viewing writing as an act that involves dumping information into
pre-existing containers (an attitude that I see in my own classes, particularly
among beginning writers), students learn to perceive themselves as active
participants in the building of a network. That is, in becoming practiced in
folksonomy and other acts of prosumption, students learn that they ultimately
have an effect on the shape that the network takes. Since the implicit goal
for many rhetoric-based writing courses involves training students to think
rhetorically about the effects that their writing might have on an audience,
incorporating folksonomy and other nontraditional composition practices
into the material of the course increases the chance that students will leave
the composition classroom with the unambiguous conviction that writing can
be both democratic and participatory.

Notes
1. Jeff Rice also discusses the concept of writer-as-DJ in his hypertext “essay” “The
Street Finds Its Own Use for Things.” Rice recommends a critical use of the concept
of DJ as a way to interrupt the perceptions of linearity that inhere in traditional
writing: “In composition studies, the turntable and mixing skills DJs employ are
considered irrelevant to an academic practice concerned with clear, concise, and

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linear dissemination of information, typically in a prescribed format that bears no

resemblance to the DJ’s methods of record collecting and, currently, sampling. . . .
Cutting and pasting disparate sounds and music, the DJ forms intricate collages,
fashioning new writing from a collection of past works. Often, and particularly in
hip hop, DJ compositions are critical examinations of cultural practices: racism,
misogyny, drug abuse, media influence and control—all topics that also dominate
a considerable amount of writing courses and composition textbooks.”
2. Similar arguments have been made in the field of genre studies—i.e., that although
genres by their nature appear to be ready-made “containers” to be filled by the
individual writer or speaker, they actually help to influence and shape conditions
for rhetorical production as well as the identity and ethos of the writer. See, for
example, Amit Bawarshi’s Genre and the Invention of the Writer.

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Jodie Nicotra
Jodie Nicotra received her PhD in rhetoric and composition from Penn State Uni-
versity in 2005. She is currently assistant professor and assistant director of writing
at the University of Idaho.

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