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Abstract

Tagging, part of the ‘social’ turn in new media, asks users to categorically describe media objects with which they interact, including web pages, videos, and photos. This more populist technology empowers ‘folk’ input into the shaping and framing of digital objects. It empowers the sharing of local, personal ontologies that speak to diverse ways of categorizing and describing the world. Tagging concurrently promotes, however, flattened versions of identity, stabilizing categories and frameworks, devaluing possibilities for movement beyond or among fixed identities, though some dynamic tag systems present users with the possibility to consider shifting categories over time. Yet the world of new media need not resign itself to these mixed conclusions, as another line of technologies has emerged to prioritize the performative, resist tags and categories, and empower digitally interruptive encounters that destabilize the fixing of identification.

Keywords

database gender identity mediatization ontologies performance representation tagging

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Tagging it: Considering how ontologies limit the reading of identity

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