All Indexing is Wrong; Some Indexing is Useful: Social Tagging in Libraries

Social tagging, the activity and process by which users add descriptive tags to
shared, digital content, is a socio-politically significant form of indexing. It satisfies the four basic criteria of a social movement: collective challenge, common purpose, solidarity, and sustained collective action (Tarrow, 1994). Most significantly, social tagging is carried out from the bottom upwards by means of user contributions and not from the top downwards by means of authoritative rule. The adoption of an anarchist paradigm for the future study and implementation of social tagging would ensure that it is understood, maintained, and further developed as a social movement.