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February 19, 2006

On Tagging People

My husband and I had this really interesting conversation in the car the other night about memes and how they work, which turned into a discussion on the idea of tagging people. We used my LibraryTechtonics.info blog and mutual experience with LiveJournal (also denoted here as LJ) to make our way through the discussion.

While we are a geek household overall (he's a programmer at heart, although his day job is working as a CDA for a pharmaceutical company), I do spend way more time online and playing with the social aspects of the Interweb than he does. So when he asked questions about how memes worked in online culture, and how "tagging" someone to follow the meme worked, we ended up wandering our way into a conversation about how social networks function online, and what part memes play in social networking.

We started out talking about how memes get from place to place. For a long time, I was a meme quiz boycotter. While other people find it entertaining to figure out what Hogwarts house they would live in, or what Crayola color name they are most like, I just don't. The quizzes themselves can be really short but stupid, or way to long to spend time on, and the results tend to range from lame to snarky to, on the rare occasion, spot on. Furthermore, the quizzes are created by anonymous people, and for many of the quizzes there's no telling what logic is used on the backend to calculate your results.

Fact of the matter is, with the advent of sites like Quizilla, anyone can create one of these meme quizzes for free, based on their own data alone, and have hundreds of thousands of users from community-based blog services like, say, LiveJournal, posting their individual results and encouraging others to do the same. It's pretty empowering stuff. And, participating in memes tends to, like developing large Friends lists, aid in amassing social capital within the social networking landscape, although because I don't track quiz-based memes, I'm not sure if creating the meme quizzes (especially if they are often well-trafficked) scores you extra points.

Memes come in the non-Quizillaish variety as well. Someone, somewhere, comes up with an idea for a meme, ususally consisting of statements or questions that are designed to tell the world more about the meme-taker, and posts the questions with their responses to their blog.

There are a few methods by which these memes spread, but it's pretty safe to say that they're all viral. Reading your LiveJournal Friends page, you might see the results of a meme from a Friend, and decide you want to participate in the meme, too. This may take the form of posting a comment to the meme post, or by posting the meme to your LJ for other Friends and non-Friend readers to see. I have rarely seen LJ users "tag" other Friends to participate in a meme (calling them out by name and sort of "asking" them to play; I'll use "tag" to denote this practice, and just plain tag to talk about the folksonomy keyword phenomenon), it just seems to happen because other readers want to play.

Important tangent: I use Friends to describe the Friends list that exists within any social networking service, because a Friends list can contain people you know well, people you don't know terribly well but like to read, people you like online but you've never met in person (and might very well be awful in meatspace but "read" amicably), and just about any iteration of level of connection. Capital F Friends online aren't necessarily the same as the definition of a meatspace, or "in real life", friend.

In the greater scope of the blogosphere, you might see meme results via your RSS feed for a blog, or through a vanity search on your blog or a tag search of blog content, and decide to play. Because the greater blog world isn't directly connected by a Friends list infrastructure, in my experience there seems to be a higher incidence of "tagging" someone to participate. Sometimes you might even receive an email, or IM message, or some request ahead of time to OK the "tag," just so you know it's coming, but that doesn't always happen.

So why play the meme game? What purpose does it serve? To many, it's just plain fun. I can see how it can be a subconscious way to share more information about yourself without necessarily feeling like you're talking about yourself all the time (it's kind of passive-aggressive, kind of not). Or, the meme may cover questions not normally considered in the everyday, and thus serve as an interesting exercise. Either way, you are sharing something of yourself with Friends, friends, and random Web readers. Whether or not people realize it, meme play also increases a person's social networking worth. If you play well with others, have interesting answers to questions about yourself, and play often, they like you more, and you may attract more Friends and end up on more Friends lists.

With the advent of tagging on LiveJournal, you can now categorize your own posts using tags, so it's easy to tag a post "meme" if you want. I tag mine "toys," because that's how I see memes. If they look fun, they achieve toy status in my brain, and I'll play. Some memes are just too silly, or have oddly-skewed quizzes, or are interesting. Some memes are too personal, and I just don't feel like sharing. But if I do play, I can look at my tags listing and see what memes are in past posts.

It's the "too personal" memes that led to the notion of tagging people. Currently, LiveJournal uses the Friends list feature to offer users the option to filter posts. If a post is "locked" (also known as "Friends locked"), then by default only people on your Friends list can view the post, and only if they're logged into LiveJournal at the time. You can take it the next step further, and create subfilters. A friend of mine who happens to be getting married created a filter that shows her wedding posts only to her Friends who have expressed interest, so as not to bother her other Friends with the information.

What if you could control who saw your memes by who saw posts tagged meme? How would this fit into current social networking site frameworks?

My husband's idea was to take these filters and convert them to tags, and then allow the option to add tags to specific users, an elegant programming solution. While current social networking is somewhat "autistic" in the way it deals with relationships, and the idea of the online Friend is tenuous at best, the ability to add detail of relationship definition would be a pretty spiffy thing. It could also offer you the option to "date" or attract Friends who see your post based on who they are tagged as and what posts you allow them to see before "marrying" them officially to your Friends list.

However, this is where it started to get hairy. Currently, the basic LJ Friends filter system is unidirectional. You can control who is on your Friends list, but you can't control whose Friends list you are added to. You can ban people from posting comments to your posts and showing up in your "Friend of" list (Friend or not), but that's the best you can do. So under my husband's proposed framework, should people tags function the same way? Editing someone elses tags about you seems counter to the tagging idea altogether, but should the option to allow other users that editing right even be offered (much like being able to add or delete tags to photos on Flickr)? What about having preset tags? Does that take away too much control? Or is it just enough to keep the bad apples from spamming other people with derogatory tags?

Can the fragile social networking environment handle that level of personal interaction? I'm not sure. Right now, social networking seems to thrive on the aspect of the disconnect of the truly personal, or, alternately, the anonymized sharing of the truly personal. It might emotionally and mentally break things, or it might take it to the next level.

Are there services that have played with this idea? Driving around in the car, I couldn't say, but I was certain this idea wasn't new, even though I hadn't thought or read much about it, especially in the library context (it might have turned up somewhere, but with my devotion to my feeds seriously lacking, I hadn't seen it). Upon further research, I found a good amount of interesting stuff.

This is definitely a Web 2.0 thing that seems not to have enough play in the library world. I see it as somewhat of a reminder that considering content and information about people and things is not the same as considering the resulting relationships and knowledge about people and things on the New Web (an incomplete thought in my brain that's still a work in progress).

Interesting links on people tagging (and other related bits worth noting):
[all accessed 2/18/2006]

February 19, 2006 9:51 AM