Me and Malcolm McLaren

This is the story behind that photograph. Malcolm McLaren was notorious for a variety of reasons. He was in a relationship with the avant garde fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, introduced fetish-wear, managed various punk rock bands including the Sex Pistols, and was agent provocateur and innovator in the art and music scenes for decades. It could be claimed that he was not only the originator of punk rock, but also one of the prime movers in the New Wave and Hip Hop music genres. He earned the nickname 'The Godfather of Punk' during this period, but in his later years, he seemed to have mellowed out to a more avuncular version of his younger restless self.

When I heard that he was to speak at the 2009 Handheld Learning Festival in London, I made sure I had a front row seat. I wanted to hear what McLaren would say about learning and about technology. Further, what would be his take on education and its place in society? Would he be controversial, caustic, conciliatory? Predictably, McLaren did not disappoint, polarising the audience with a very personal, sardonic and provocative account of his own learning journey. His reference to Karoake culture resonated - where anyone through the medium of technology, especially the reality TV shows, can become famous ... for simply being in the public eye for long enough. His key message was that failure and messiness are the key to the best kinds of learning. None of us at the time were to know that he had very little time left to live. A few days after this public appearance, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and died 6 months later, in a hospital in Switzerland.

I took several photographs of Malcolm during his speech. The one I considered to be the best was posted up onto my Flickr account, and I labelled it for free reuse as I always do, under Creative Commons licencing. I also used the image in my subsequent blog post entitled Karaoke Culture. It turned out to be one of the last photographs ever taken of him. Later, someone saw my photograph on Flickr and uploaded it for use on his Wikipedia page. It was thereafter mirrored on all the other foreign language versions of Wikipedia. When Malcolm McLaren died, guess where many of the journals and newspapers went to find copyright free images of him?

This is why newspapers such as the Caledonian Mercury and the London Daily News, websites such as Shapers of the 80's and Compas, and Goldmine all carried the image when they reported on McLaren's funeral. It appears that my name (credited with the photograph) will forever be linked to that of Malcolm McLaren. What have I learnt from this experience? Just being in the right place at the right time is not always enough. Posting your content on social media sites and making them available for free use and reuse is not only an equitable way of sharing the love. It is often a precursor for widespread amplification of that content. Whether or not something goes viral is left to the whims of the social web, but giving your content away for free can give it an excellent chance. 


Me and Malcolm McLaren by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Folksonomies, memes and misunderstanding

It all started with a message on Twitter from @stephendale who stated: "A taxonomist: One who organizes information in ways that makes sense to content providers, rather than content users." I thought this was a real gem, because it represented all that is 'corporate control' and 'top down' on the Web. I responded (as you do) with my own version: "A folksonomist: one who organises information in ways that make sense to his/her own community of practice or interest." It was retweeted several times by others and they seemed to like my definition. I was thinking about individuals tagging and organising their own content using tools such as Delicious, and then making them available to others. When we tag an object says Mike Wesch, we 'teach the machine'. In other words, the more we tag objects, the more they become visible to others who may be interested in them, and as Andy Clark has suggested, the more they become visible, the easier becomes the pathway to finding them.

@patparslow didn't like my definition though. Taking issue with it in his blogpost he says: "A folksonomy loses its qualities as a folksonomy once you have someone 'organising' it, and will quickly become a taxonomy." I hear what he is saying, but this wasn't what I had in mind and what he describes sounds suspiciously like a meme to me. Memes are units of information or ideas that are transmitted from mind to mind through speech, written word or, more than likely in the digital age, through a social network. They tend to emerge without being planned and spread virally. Look at the trending topics column on Twitter and you will see what I mean. Folksonomy is not chaotic though, and does require some organisation by individuals - there is always some intelligence behind it, or as James Surowiecki has aptly suggested - the 'wisdom of the crowd'. There always has to be some organisation at an individual level, or there would be no folksonomy at the community level - all would remain chaotic.

Then @3quarks said my definition of folksonomist sounded a little like a 'spin doctor'. Well, it might I suppose, but for the fact that the community of interest I intended was one in which people were not trying to influence each other, but simply going individually about their personal learning through organisation of content. The Holistic Web blogpost Taxonomy vs Folksonomy says it all really - a taxonomy is predictable, whereas a folksonomy is flexible. Taxonomies are imposed, but folksonomies are democratic.

Here's my opinion on this for what it's worth: In a taxonomy, the community defines the content. In a folksonomy the content defines the community. So, I don't want to be misunderstood, but neither do I want to misunderstand. Are we all singing from the same hymnsheet, (or are we independently harmonising)?

Thanks to Stephen Dale, Pat Parslow and Mel Phillips for kicking this one off. :-)=