clarity or catastrophe

there are a lot of ways that email could be changing.
a lot of exciting stuff is going on online that seems to be indicating a shift in the way we look at all of our information, not just our email.
in the meantime, email is a daily part of the lives of millions of people who have never heard of gmail, or folksonomy, or ajax.
the average american office worker has been using email for ten years now, and in that span of time it has crept into more and more regions of the job, to the point that, for many people, several hours a day are taken up with the activity.
this increased role of email is a blessing and a curse.
as more kinds of information are funnelled into the inbox, the task of email management has become more complex.
no longer just a repository of memos and chain letters, email now serves as a task management system, a scheduling resource, and a means for shuffling versions of files between members of teams as revisions are made. the expectation of an electronic record has also increased the demand for information about communications that was previously lost in the ether – when was this sent? what did they say when we asked them _____? did so and so ever reply to that request for a new tax form?
the management of all of this still falls upon the office worker, who has received no special training, and who tends to approach the work of email classification in the same way that he/she approaches paper filing.

tagging allows us to annotate along multiple dimensions, which enables us to find things from more angles. “do you remember that memo last month about the new grant protocols?” or “wasn’t there a memo where craig replied and asked about funding implications? that’s the one i want!”

tagging is time-consuming, however, and adding another task to the work of organization doesn’t seem the clearest way to make things better. if people have a hard time figuring out a file structure, they have a hard time figuring out a tag structure as well. it takes a committment that many people don’t have the time to give, despite the fact that it would bring major benefits in the long run.
there are reasons that tagging is different than filing – the opportunity cost of picking one tag over another is much lower, and an understanding of the final structure isn’t necessary when you set out. this isn’t immediately clear, however, and there are still potentially overwhelming considerations of bundling and repetition.

what i wonder is, can we make tagging easier?
what makes it hard?
what can the computer do for us, and what must we do for ourselves?
can we make the barriers in front of our parts any smaller?

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