Matt McAlister posted a piece called "Lightweight social interactions in a loosely coupled offline world." In it he expresses his desire to be able to tag his acquaintances, and other offline aspects of our lives, as a form of lightweight interaction. While the data that would result from such a system (assuming a flawless offline social interaction tagging system) would surely come in handy and possibly create improved political discourse as McAlister notes, we have to be aware/wary of the implications. The ability to freely tag individuals (I'm imagining a sort of del.icio.us for people) takes Foucault's concept of disciplinary individuality through institutional labelling and observance to a new extreme. An extreme that makes the swarm-the collective action of society-an all-encompassing disciplinary institution. Individuals would become their tags, become as they have been tagged, as they tag themselves.

This can be extended to much of the discussion of attention data, with the idea of attention as a form of self-tagging. It's necessary to explore the darker, less optimistic, sides of folksonomy and tagging. These systems are, without a doubt, useful, dynamic, and soon to be unavoidable, but there's always more to the story.