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?

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