Categories

Thought on categories.

I was reading about document engineering (not my favorite topic) a couple of weeks ago, while researching PhD programs, and came across some interesting ideas about how people create categories.

It got me thinking about tagging again (an old topic, bla) but then more broadly about the relationship between tagging, categorisation and language itself. As much as I love and believe a taxonomy is critical to finding things, and DPKO has worked hard to establish and implement a taxonomy, I thinks its equally critical to establish from the outset that taxonomies are evolving creatures. That, I think, is the great lesson of the tagging phenomenon; that categories are fluid, so fluid in fact that their ephemerality is apparent even in the smallest groups of people. The play/struggle to convey meaning comes down to the microlevel of each communication. In each sentence we speak, we reconcile the meaning of the word with the experience we are enmeshed within. We see the apple, it is unlike any other apple we have seen, we adjust the meaning of the word apple with this new sensation, and it hooks into all the cognitive schema embedded in the neural network. The mind is supple.

AND in fact the best taxonomies ever created are whole languages.

So it got me thinking about how language changes and evolves. Looking at an initial attempt to understand the difference between tagging, categorisation and taxonomy, I came up with the following diagram. It needs improvement, but perhaps its something.

collapse of borders

The thought here is about networks vs. institutions

Just reading Guehenno's End of the Nation State and in it we find a somewhat blistering if highfalutin critique of the "networked age." Not to contradict my boss, but it seems overly negative, and taking the argument to its logical conclusion, is somewhat romantically tragic.

He claims the beginning of the modern "nation state" was struck at the French Revolution, and describes how globalisation, network thinking, and the end of the cold war are bringing about the collapse of an ancient tie of people to physical space. This basic tie supports all Euro-centric organising ideas of institutional rule (kingdom and nation state), with governing parties being able to collect taxes and otherwise dominate by defining territory. He describes how Middle Eastern governing notions were never tied to territory, but rather networks of tribes and clans wandering in the sands, and predicts that the world will become "Lebanonized." This means, "the collapse of the political" and the end of the nation state as we civilized people know it.

I suppose I start from a different point in understanding the idea of networks, in that I see the behavior rooted in natural systems; biological, physical, chemical, economic, etc. This approach has a sound scientific basis. So we might be naturally disdainful of this alarm bell, which seems overly ....? Wait a second, in fact, the only real counterpoint I can think of (besides insubstantial comments on eurocentricism, overintellectulising, and what I can only describe as being overly-French) - is that this argument is overly centered on humans!

It might seem contradictory, but bear with me.

The essential argument he makes is that networks make institutions weak. Specifically, information networks make our current institutions weak because all our institutions until now have been grounded, literally in national territories. And institutions, as an organizing system, are key to the rule of law, therefore bad news for the nation state, the pinnacle of institutional development. But it also means bad news, following Guehenno's logic, for all institutions that are founded on any kind of universal principle - schools, health systems, legal systems, religious systems. Standards can only be imposed in a system that embraces the universal basis of a standard; i.e. standard doses of inoculations, standard No Child Left Behind testing, standard application of the First Amendment. The more networks hold sway, the less universality there is and therefore the less universally any standard can be upheld. The center does not hold and slouching towards Bethlehem we go. VERY good argument! Networks DO have a habit of undermining what we call "institutions." And within this logic, it is true. And perhaps it will play out in the way he describes.

But, if we look at biological systems, or other non-political human systems behavior, we see that standards are always being contested, though there is a funny relationship to physical space. Networks not only undermine institutions, they also build them up, keep them alive. Networks coalesce and dissolve into other forms.

At any given time, there is a central point in any network, for a millisecond before it moves elsewhere. There is a critical mass that defines the network, gives it definition; the social movement gets enough signatures to get on the ballot, the crowd in central park has enough alcohol and noise that it becomes a assaulting mob. But within its structure and on the borders, actually everywhere, the definition of any network is contested in large ways and small. People signing the initiative may change their mind, the mob may contain people who protect the victims. The US is a nation state governed by the rule of law, but it is contested every day on the streets of Park Slope! It just that it doesn't get far before being contradicted or ignored. The funny part about physical space is that the actual terrain tends to influence the shape of the network, its components and its nodes/clusters, etc.

Horribly, though, if you take the scientific view of the situation (a la Duncan Watts,Barabasi, etc.), it is inevitable that the nation state is contested and is replaced, upgraded, or it degrades. In this thinking, nation states are only the temporary solidification, the arbitrary ossification of networks that once existed, and attempted to make their rules permanent. The French state is the the solidification of a network of revolutionaries that attempted to make their values stick by embedding them in institutional forms (schools, governments, etc.). The current nation states are breaking down exactly in the way Guehenno describes - tribes held in check for decades are contesting the old European and US borderlines. By de facto behavior, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is flaunted by nations everywhere as just the expression of that other social network of people - those westerners with their exasperating expectations. In fact, China's actions betray an understanding of the nation state in a whole different way, don't you think?

Its not cheerful, politically, to think that this might be the case. Though I disagree with Guehenno's linear view of political evolution (european-defined democratic boundaried nation state being at the the pinnacle of some grand timeline of humanity), I hate to disagree with it either! As much as I know that time is non-linear, history is multifaceted, vast movements can be redirected in the blink of an eye, I also think there might be optimal "settings" for our little earth. If the earth with all its humans are one little system within a huge universe, I like to think there might be a few best ways it could run. And maybe collections of people in countries that decide their own destiny and respect humanity is one way. Damn American optimism again.

The funny thing, in the end, about Guehenno's argument is that it is almost obsessively focused on the human, and the political. It fits in network logic to fit its own argument, going only a quarter of the way to understanding network behavior but falling short.