The importance of classification in today’s society is very high. Everyone tends to rely on it when searching for different material. Dye explains in her article “Folksonomy: A Game of High-tech (and Highstakes) Tag” that classification also known as folksonomy is very beneficial; it is generated metadata taken from multiple sources, tagging digital information with their own searchable keywords. This idea of organizing information in this particular way has been sought out early on in life. Wright states in his article “Family trees and the tree of life” that, “Even the most seemingly divergent cultures seem to employ almost identical strategies for organizing information, following a pattern that Berlin dubbed ‘ethnobiological rank,’ or the use of hierarchical categories to describe the characteristics of plants and animals”. See classification has been around for a long time and continues to increasingly become broader.
Without classification it will be much harder to do any research on certain topics when only given a short period of time to complete it. Imagine life without folksonomy or classification, it would take many hours to finish a simple search on the internet. This is why some believe that classification is needed in today’s society. Dye said that, “The richness and participation of the communities around these folksonomies are, in large part, what fuel interest in them”. Not only are we sharing insight on the same interests but we are building our knowledge from each others thoughts and facts that is put out for the world to see.
