There’s a discussion on the DC-SOCIAL TAGGING mailingslist about what so social about social tagging.
Many interesting viewpoints have emerged. It started with a question by Liddy Nevile:
I would like us to think carefully again about calling it social tagging - I suspect that ’social’ tagging has a theoretical implication - that it’s tagging done ‘for society’ or ‘by society’ and we should not be careless about these terms. Different motivation might mean different ways of thinking about and using the process of tagging.
What do you think???
Tagging may be social or “non-social”. It becomes “social” when it’s - to some degree at least - “negotiated”
And put a refernce to a post he made back in November 2006: The “social” in social tagging
My thoughts on the matter is that the process of adding tags to resources, does not have to be social (as I defined in an earlier post about what does social means), but it can be. On the other hand the collection of all the users applied tags must be some sort of social organization. It becomes social when it no longer just concerns one user, but is something that involves many users and the ties between them. I find that the social aspect starts when one see the tags as something that is tying users together.
