“It is often easier, more comprehensible, and more productive to define diverse and diffuse communities—especially Internet communities—in terms of the things to which they gravitate rather than the abstract conceptual boundaries that separate them from other communities.”
Tom Scheinfeldt, “Found History”
Categorization is one of the things that makes humans, human. We strive to understand things by comparing them to other things, and we take great care to categorize everything appropriately. In a way, this is our own form of signal processing — finding subtle similarities between different things, and using them to group those things. However, the issue with categorization is that it is inherently limiting. If I categorize Twitter into the category of “Social Network,” I fail to mention all the little things and features that make Twitter Twitter, and instead, I reduce it to just another one of the hundreds of social networks out there.
We categorize groups of people in a similar manner, and in doing so, we lose so much of our understanding of nuance and complexity in group dynamics. In order to understand and describe groups of people more accurately, Scheinfeldt says that we should describe groups of people in terms of the things they gravitate to or enjoy consuming as opposed to characteristics of that group. For example, instead of the conceptual group of “Football fans,” we could create groups of people: people who like watching football, and people who like playing football. Some of the people in those groups would also belong to other groups, such as people who like gardening, and so on, such that we can describe every aspect of a person just by listing all the “groups” that that person belongs to. So, instead of having static categories that completely describe any “kind” of person, each person would belong to a number of groups, allowing for more nuance and complexity.
