You’ve probably noticed how diverse the topics of my blog posts can get. Anime, professional wrestling, media theory, comic books, /b/, the Internet. You’ve also probably noticed that my post tags reflect this diversity.

Now imagine how limited my writing would be if I limited myself to a single narrow topic every time I wrote. Say, anime, without talking about the effect of the advent of broadband or the influence of Western animation or its synergy with Japanese music. And yet this is how we used to define things — genres, individuals, movements.

Think about your Pictures folder on your computer and how you sort individual files. Some pictures fall under Family, for example, and some under Friends. What happens when you have a picture that has both Friends and Family in it? Do you upgrade it into a higher-tier (but more general and vague) category, ‘Loved Ones’? Do you decide that the presence of family members in the photo trumps the presence of friends and sort it accordingly, or vice versa? Do you place one copy in each of the folders? What if your sister is your best friend too?

Now think of how simple it is to simply tag the photo with both ‘Friends’ and ‘Family’.

The same thing applies to individuals. Think of someone famous, like Jose Rizal for instance. (I don’t want to debate historical accuracy here. I’m referring to the predominant ‘myth’ of Rizal.) We usually toss him in the category ‘hero’ and think nothing more of him. Categories are shortcuts.

But tags are handles. Rizal was also a novelist, poet, polyglot, fencer, ‘illustrado’, and womanizer. (Maybe some of you would like to throw in the ‘Allegedly Hitler’s Dad’ tag too.) Each of these tags adds resolution to our picture of the guy, much more than the simple ‘National Hero’ category could possibly give.

Now think of yourself. Think of the category people tend to lump you and your interests into. Geek. Jock. Airhead. Weirdo. Otaku. Doesn’t really say much, does it?

Now tag yourself. Tag your interests. I’ll give you some of mine: Computers. Music. Anime. Science. Games. Comic books. Law. Philosophy. Literature. TV Shows. Movies. Personal Finance.

Now let’s drill down and tag one of those broad tags. Let’s take a selection of tags from Games: Console Games. PC Games. Role-Playing Games. Board Games.

Now let’s pick Board Games, because it’s the tag that most non-board-game-geeks assume is all Monopoly and Chess: Monopoly. Chess. (Start with the basics.) The Game of Life. Settlers of Catan. Princes of Florence. Senator. Acquire. Cashflow. Lord of the Rings. Diplomacy.

Head spinning yet? Each one of the tags drill down all the way to specifics like this. And all of those tags add up to me. So does a neat category like ‘Geek’ or ‘Otaku’ encapsulate me? Or are you over-simplifying who I am so you can dismiss me out of hand?

In his book The Long Tail, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson discusses what he calls the Massively Parallel Culture, which is rapidly replacing mass culture. Instead of a homogenous lump of people who are all into the same things (which our current mass media tries to cultivate), we are developing into individual members of many tribes, some which overlap (for example cartoons, comics) and some which don’t (cosplay, basketball, indie rock). So it no longer makes any sense to diss someone because they don’t belong to one of your tribes (ball-jointed dolls) when most likely you both share another (anime).

Yes, I’m part of the Lawyer Tribe (which you may detest). But I’m also part of the Otaku Tribe. So what will it gain you to reduce me to one or the other?

Stop pigeon-holing. Start tagging.

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