AN EXAMINATION OF AUTHORITY IN SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS

Champions of social classification praise its flexible and collaborative nature, in contrast to the rigidity and authoritarianism that they see in traditional classificative structures (such as Kroski, 2005; Shirky, 2005c; Merholz, 2004). In the view of these writers, social classification applications such as the photo storage Web site Flickr and the Web bookmarks manager del.icio.us are both democratic, incorporating the participation of all Web users, and emergent, changing rapidly in response to new content. On the other hand, traditional methods for organizing information, particularly those that involve hierarchy, are seen as exclusive, because they may not represent all users’ viewpoints, and imprecise, because they cannot be easily adapted for the rapid pace of content development engendered by Web publishing