{"id":729,"date":"2005-01-22T12:22:08","date_gmt":"2005-01-22T17:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=729"},"modified":"2005-01-22T12:22:08","modified_gmt":"2005-01-22T17:22:08","slug":"categories-and-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=729","title":{"rendered":"categories and meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a technology and politics mailing list, there was some enthousiastic discussion about developing common taxonomy in order to build political agreement.<br \/>\nI think this view misunderstands the role of categories in shared understanding.<br \/>\nAt fine-grained, concrete level, a shared schema for voter and constituent data is extremely powerful.<br \/>\nAt the larger level, though, labels don&#8217;t get you that far toward shared understanding and shared effective action.<br \/>\nMeaning isn&#8217;t in the nouns. Meaning is in the stories we tell.  Meaning is in the actions we take.  Meaning is annealed out of conversation.  Meaning is in a strategy and supporting tactics.<br \/>\nFolksonomy might make the software challenge easier &#8212; the disparate political blogs and websites could just pick their own categories, and aggregation tools like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/\">Technorati tags<\/a> could reveal the implicit concensus about labels.<br \/>\nBut folksonomy won&#8217;t get us that far toward shared meaning and action, either. <a href=\"http:\/\/del.icio.us\">Del.icio.us<\/a> tells us that the most popular tags are blog, programming, web, music, software, design, news, and linux.  The tag popularity metric shows what topics are popular, and lets the reader browse through the popular content under the tag.<br \/>\nIt still requires an act of synthesis to describe what people really care about, when they bookmark &#8220;music&#8221;, &#8220;software&#8221;, and &#8220;design&#8221;.<br \/>\nIt still requires acts of human organization and communication to build shared understanding, agreement, and effective action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a technology and politics mailing list, there was some enthousiastic discussion about developing common taxonomy in order to build political agreement. I think this view misunderstands the role of categories in shared understanding. At fine-grained, concrete level, a shared schema for voter and constituent data is extremely powerful. At the larger level, though, labels &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=729\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;categories and meaning&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-bL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}