WordPress-based blogs have countless advantages: backup functionality, easy maintenance, a wide range of mode choices, and abundant room for expansion. Apart from the legendary drawback that they seem to consume comparatively more server resources, they are really beyond criticism.
For me, apart from the crucial ability to be backed up, WordPress also offers another crucial revolution compared with the Yaiku blog: namely, a revolution in the way categories are arranged.
This revolution looks trivial at first glance: it is simply a shift from the original linear, segmented model to a many-to-many correspondence. In other words, on Yaiku, each post belongs to, and belongs only to, one folder, whereas under the WordPress system, each post can belong to multiple “Categories.”
On Yaiku, the name of the category column is simply “folder.” Although this word has also become a basic concept in computing, it is ultimately a product of the print era; not only was it unimaginable in the oral era, but in the manuscript era it also lacked a corresponding concept. According to the etymology site http://www.etymonline.com, the word folder appeared around 1550, and is nothing more than a name derived from fold, with no Latin or Greek root at all. And that date happens to coincide with the period when printing was beginning to flourish. This, of course, is no coincidence: printing gave rise to a new mode of classification. This mode of classification is not merely related to organizing books and texts; it is also related to a more fundamental and general activity of classification. When we look at Linnaeus’s biological taxonomy or Kant’s table of categories, we see the style of “folders” shimmering through them. Aristotle already had his ten categories, and he also had animal classification; he clarified the definitional method of genus and differentia. But he never, like scholars in the print era, drew up a “list” corresponding to classifications; his zoology did not spell out the “positions” of various animals one by one according to the so-called genus-and-differentia method. To gather various things into various categories in an orderly fashion, just as one files diverse documents neatly into folders, is a habit of thought that probably only came into full bloom in the print era.
Although the classification methods of the manuscript era were not as clear-cut and sectional as those of the print era, they were certainly quite different from those of the oral era. For example, the Greek root of the word category (category, class, category) is katēgoria (statement, accusation), from katēgoros (accuser) and kategorein (to speak against; to accuse, assert, predicate). In other words, it comes from the act of “accusation” in public trials. In accusing, we need to classify and define another person’s character or crimes, and these “charges” are the original meaning of category.
Although we do not know in detail how the ancient Greeks originally made accusations, we can imagine that this mode of “classification” differs from the definitional pattern of genus and differentia, and differs even more from the filing pattern of “folders”—modern trials, thanks to the indexing provided by written law and the filing demanded by case dossiers, have gradually adopted a folder-like mode of classification, but what about the oral era? Clearly, this mode could not be segmented into neat blocks; a person or an action could be defined in multiple ways and simultaneously placed under different degrees of reproach. The earliest ways people classified things were no more than this: it is fierce, huge, edible; it is bright, tiny, poisonous… People used logos, used “speech,” to “command” things.
Another related word—catalogue—has a different origin. It comes from the Greek word katalogos (a list, register, enrollment). Although it contains the root logos (obviously, these concepts originally all came from oral culture), it seems to have carried the shadow of writing culture at a relatively early stage; meanings such as list, registration, and enrollment can only be understood against the background of writing technology.
It is worth noting that the name of the classification module provided by WordPress—of course not folder, but also not catalogue, rather category—was translated in the Chinese version as “分类目录” (“classification directory”), which is obviously a free translation. Category does have the meaning of “classification,” but not the sense of “directory.” Yet this smooth and natural translation, “classification directory,” precisely reveals the intrinsic connection between the two: the way things are organized and the way texts are arranged. In a profound sense, the order of things is the order of texts. (I have not yet seriously studied Foucault’s The Order of Things; this insight comes from the perspective of media ontology.)
In order to give the so-called “classification directory” a deeper meaning, on my blog I directly renamed this section “范畴” (“category” / “categories”). This “范畴” is both category in the sense of Aristotle’s Categories and the “table of categories,” and category in the everyday sense of “basic concept” or “keyword.”
This “范畴” is different from a “directory”: it is not arranged linearly, and each post can correspond to multiple categories. But it is also different from “keywords”: it has a clear hierarchical structure. Just as in the ancient distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities, here categories and keywords both seem to be qualitative classifications, but the former are more primary and foundational, while the latter are more flexible and fragmentary.
We will find that the column closer to expressing the concept of “keyword” is tags—“标签” (“labels”). “Keywords,” along with “index,” are also products of the print era. But they also seem inevitably to have been transformed by the network era. The traditional ways of using tags and indexes are completely outdated for network-era texts; with the development of search engine technology, today’s Google-style search no longer needs keywords. But “keywords” still retain certain values worth preserving. From being passive indexing tools appended at the end of books, they have gradually become active, prominently displayed “labels” placed at the beginning of texts, performing the function of hinting at lines of thought and focal points of discourse rather than indexing. Is the purpose of the “keywords” attached to scholarly articles on journal-search websites to make searching easier? I am afraid not. Even on some website platforms whose search engines still remain in a “pre-Google” stage, searching by keywords is still a good method; but as search technology improves, the status of keywords in retrieval is bound to decline day by day. If keywords will without doubt always also appear in the title or abstract, then for a powerful search engine, specially marked keywords are dispensable. The meaning of keywords as something passively provided at the end of a book for people to search will increasingly be replaced by their meaning as something actively presenting itself at the very beginning—keywords are like the “labels” pasted on products, telling you what basic features and uses this thing has.
And this active, suggestive “label” in turn provides a way of searching. At first glance, this method seems no different from the traditional keyword index; however, the difference is that here the keyword first plays an active role. For example, on this blog, keywords are first displayed in the form of a “tag cloud,” with different words appearing in different sizes according to their frequency of occurrence, drawing your attention and stimulating your interest. You can click on a keyword and follow that line of clues to browse the articles; and when browsing a certain article, you may also, through the links established by tags (and categories), be led to other articles. In a traditional book, if you want to browse by jumping among different chapters according to a specific line of clues, the only thing you can rely on is the table of contents. But here, on the medium of “hypertext,” we suddenly possess infinite flexibility, and this flexibility is not simply random flipping around; it is all rational and orderly. Here, “keywords” provide not only a mode of retrieval, but also a mode of reading, a mode of browsing, and even a path of thought.
The mode of reading guided by WordPress-style “categories” and keywords is not a chain-like, link-by-link linear order, but neither is it a directionless disorder. This means a new order, a new mode of thinking, and a new method of induction.
What kind of academic forms will such new media models bring about? And what kind of world order might they even unfold? It is still too early to say. Let us wait and see.
December 14, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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