Tags and categories seem to rule the electronic world, by allowing us to create a common vocabulary by which we communicate. Common search terms allow us to share our thoughts and ideas to other common-minded people, and information is spreading faster than any other point in history. It’s allowed everybody to have a platform to share their creativity effectively, and within this platform the common user has the ability to categorize their own material. These tags allow users to place their content within a category which is presumably viewed by other users, increasing the popularity of their own media platform in the process. However, the concept of folksonomy is not a perfect one; scaling issues such as trending tags maintaining their popularity discourage personal tags from being used, which ultimately causes a less diverse categorizing model. It creates a certain level of mob mentality within these media platforms as their users desperately attempt to increase their popularity through the power of the trending tag.
As social media skills develop, a future of a tag utopia might be a possibility. Through the process of cleaning up irrelevant content from certain tags by moderation, the exposure of a wider variety of tags relevant to your interests, and less of a focus on trending tags; the tag categorizing system could be a lot more effective. By cleaning up irrelevant content from the tags you create a more effective category system, were the tags become reliable headings for content. This encourages the user to effectively categorize their content with the interest of placing their posts in the correct tags. Overall the social media platform would benefit from such a change, as the content being posted is effectively creating communities through themes and cutting out irrelevant content from a user’s feed.
Furthermore an exposure to a wider variety of tags to users through an effective recommended algorithm would present them with new tags which similar users are interacting with. This would widen those communities within the platform and encourage users to create diverse posts for other established groups of people within those platforms. If this change is accompanied by a lesser focus drawn towards popularity of tags, it would effectively decrease the obsession with the mob mentality currently present on many social media platforms.
In conclusion, the current tagging systems present in social media have set up the platform in a way which encourages users to indulge in what is popular, rather than what they would truly be interested in. It is solely focused on clicks rather than interesting output. If this can be eliminated, it is of my belief that social media could grow and progress like it never has before.
