May 2nd, 2007
Why is ‘Decay’ Such a Popular Flickr Tag?
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David Weinberger, author of ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous’, interviews BoingBoing co-editor and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow on why metadata is often just metacrap and why ‘decay’ is such a popular Flickr tag -
David: Even just elevating something as being worthy of being categorized, at least at the same level, is itself often a political act.
Cory: Yes, absolutely. What we call things is pretty important.
Cory: And then, the social incentive to tag out like others do also seems to drive people to convergence, then you have effective tag-based collaboration–I’m thinking, for example, of Flickr tags. My favorite one is the “decay” tag, where you have pictures of things that are decaying, whether it’s old, beautiful, sagging barns, or the rich texture of rust, or at leaf that’s gone to crumble, or even that stuff that’s become a science experiment in the back of the fridge.
David: Which has become, completely unpredictably, one of the most popular tags at Flickr. I mean who would have guessed that decay…?
Cory: Yes, it’s really shocking. And of course, there is a certain amount of social capital that accrues to people who now explicitly tag with “decay” in order to show up in that stream.
