When Adrain mentioned the tag cloud in the week 3 reading, my mind strayed immediately to the recent Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel movie, Sex Tape (2014). I wouldn’t recommend the film at all, but it does have a mildly amusing line,
“It went up in the cloud…Nobody understands the cloud. Its a f***ing mystery.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself Segel.

But if you strip the ‘tag cloud’ back down to what its intended purpose is, as Adrian does in the reading, it’s really just an extremely useful tool which helps to coordinate and make sense of the ‘enormous amount of material added daily’. (2007, p. 205) The use of tags is described as a folksonomy, which I later discovered is a a fairly recent word (see image) and maybe why it has an angry red line underneath it as I write it. Update your dictionary word press.

The overall concept of network literacy is in fact a very new and refreshing concept. It makes manageable and possible what I had previously deemed inaccessible. Yet, the internet doesn’t have to be a scary thing, and we can adapt and learn to understand its helpful tools just as we have to learnt to use a call number in a library. I have a feeling that this realisation is going to become more and more prominent in contemporary society and as people begin to further understand the internet, our celebrities will continue to evolve as a result. Think about YouTube sensation Jenna Marbles, or Zoe Sugg off Zoella. They wouldn’t have risen to fame had they not networked appropriately, using the right tags to attract the right people.