@skreutzer
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Hi Harry,
that’s quite interesting, I wasn’t aware of your history with the question of structure, only learned about the visual representation as a tool/approach to understand something (a topic maybe?), that’s probably to cover in your Deep Dive session(s).
I think all of us can easily agree that any structure is better than no structure, and flexible structure(s) is better than just a single, fixed one (would love to explore contrary views on this, otherwise I would assume this as the working hypothesis). There are obviously costs associated with the application of structures on what otherwise is unstructured, context-less, meaningless chaos, but that’s also the only way we know how to gain benefits from what we have or are looking at.
I didn’t think about topics as a structuring tool/mechanism (in terms of a particularly useful structuring tool, which is the whole point of introducing such structure at all, except for natural structures that exist as a matter of fact, but might not be too useful to us as we don’t understand the nature and structure of many things), where categories, taxonomies and keywords/tags are useful structuring tools in my mind, instead, I regarded topics as broad, overarching, general “brackets” that include loosely what might be relevant for a question or problem and exclude everything that doesn’t seem to be related. As the topic tends to be broad and not very specific/formal, aspects and related fields can easily be added or removed from a topic, which makes it a not very useful structuring tool, because the topic is a single structure with a flexible, versatile meaning/interpretation. One day, other, unrelated knowledge/facts/aspects/topics can turn out to be closely related to the topic, and the next day it is found that it was wrong to see a connection between both, that they are in fact unrelated, but just seemed to be related, so those things get removed again. Thus, the topic is more of a snapshot tool for declaring what the human knowledge workers think at the given time of what’s related/included in a topic, to make the distinction to what is unrelated/excluded. It’s much more difficult to deny a piece the annotation/connection to a certain category, taxonomy or keyword/tag, to no small part because they’re used on small pieces/portions where topics cover large collections of pieces, categories, taxonomies, keywords/tags, even if the latter are in conflict with each other, they can still be included into the same generalized topic as different perspectives for looking at what’s relevant with-under the topic. Sure, we know that in reality, everything is deeply intertwingled and a problem of immense complexity, so the topic as a structuring tool doesn’t reflect reality, so it is indeed just a tool, so topics face resistance/opposition by people who think that separating disciplines, stereotypes, etc. are a bad thing precisely because they’re tools that don’t reflect reality, but it’s not that they can suggest a more useful alternative (cybernetics exist, but also don’t improve the usefulness that much), but demand that the limited usefulness a topic has needs to be furtherly destructed, maybe because it’s a bad thing and misleading and dangerous to think or look at things on a broad, generalized scope, that it is an illusion that you can.
Now I don’t know if you think about topics in a similar way as you wrote your description of them with a quite different focus, but that’s where we need to re-read and discuss where our perspectives are coming from and going to. I mean, it shouldn’t be too difficult to connect my view on topics to what humans care about or have needs for, but I might have to investigate it a little more with some time to think about it. It’s also a different question if we want to improve topics or improve on topics or improve our or the structuring tools, as well as the question if our current tools/technology (properly or improperly understood and/or applied) are suitable (useful) enough for the increasingly complex problems at hand.
Just to note, before I forget: from computers we’ve learned that an answer to the latter question could be the network/”graph”, Ted Nelsons crusade against hierarchical structures, which topics are despite being flexible, because they’re “on the top” and other things “included/grouped below/within them”.
Somehow I can’t edit the initial topic post any more (was possible a few minutes ago), anyway: via Sam Hahn’s connections, there are similar things going on as well, with WordPress and without, along the lines of this, this and this. Too much to read, I know, but the point of this thread is that you don’t have to read any of it and can get a condensed summary in case of interest 😉
I think you know what tags are (as opposed to categories and taxonomies), right? So if we can’t keep discipline to stay on topic in the posts under a topic, tags on the topic level aren’t particularly helpful. I would doubt that they have any effect on search engine optimization (external crawlers like Google bot), but if a writer here comes up with a few fitting tags, why not use them anyway? It’s just that we probably won’t be able to use them to structure/organize all the topics later, tags would be more helpful on the post level I guess.
Would you say that this forum or the entire site is following the old paradigm or an expression of it?
This topic is probably referring to this discussion on Sutra.
The most important or several of them that happen to emerge for me personally right now? Or both? 😉
It’s Joshua Bridge, maybe with his separate admin account or something.
