More of a Question than a Comment

Photo by Max Chen on Unsplash

Like most internet users, I have a love/hate relationship with online comments. When I love comments, I believe that the comment section of online content has the power to build community ties through shared experience and engagement. But when I hate comments, I view comment sections as hot-beds of all of our society’s negative beliefs and ideologies. Consequently, much of my research in social media focuses on separating the wheat from the chaff and improving our collective understanding of online comments, as not just the most hated section of the internet but as a beloved part of the experience of being online.

At the same time, studying comments also means that I have encountered a lot of annoying commentaries online. And while being an educator means that I am accountable for the belief that there is no such thing as a stupid question, I do believe that there are foolish comments (most of which just happen to be questions). Instead of going to search sites, like Google or Yahoo, for information seeking, I continue to see social media users relying on other users' knowledge in comment sections. In the era of misinformation, this particular form of online engagement can have negative consequences for users.

So, I think this is an excellent time to start thinking critically about the type of comments we see online, what they say about the individual user, and how the affordances of social media platforms lead to certain types of behavior. By airing some of my grievances with online comments, I also hope that this post can begin constructing a new internet etiquette that encourages more conscious commenting and online engagement.

Colloquially Constructing the Taxonomy

There is a significant amount of slippage between the uses of a folksonomy and the creation of a taxonomy. Within internet and social media research, constructing a folksonomy corresponds to how tagging and other forms of web indexing are used to organize and categorize the content. Often, a folksonomy overlaps with the creation of metadata or data about data and is commonly used to describe how internet users categorize the content. In contrast, a taxonomy is another form of categorization which focuses on the scientific classification and coding of content or objects.