I posted about micronaming in landscapes that often happens when people do not use maps and would like to clarify how this differs from the technological methodology of atomisation.
Information Architecture and labelling
Atomisation is something that Information Architecture can get trapped by. The ideal of clarity thru defining and naming elements becoming a spiral of greater and greater splitting of things into pieces and labels.
This is the Western philosophical trap of atomisation. If establishing boundaries between artefacts and naming them enables understanding then doing more of that will create greater understanding. More atoms, more names.
This is a problem when there is no brake. It is especially a problem in digital spaces where the landscapes and platforms are both endlessly shifting and deeply fragmented.
It is both possible and inevitable that information architecture will be trapped by atomisation in such an environment.
Micronaming
That active shifting and innate fragmentation of place is why micronaming is different.
Micronaming is embodied to places that people live in and move thru, both in their own human lifetimes and the long histories of their communities.
To wayfind thru such a communal place is to name everything and to use that memory of naming to establish both a timeline and pathline.
This is why rocks are individually named, places where animals were killed memorialise and the nests and songs of specific birds known.
This is a shared deep map of being in a place and knowing that attention and memory will always provide a route.
Micronaming is not atomisation. It does not disconnect the pieces of reality to provide deeper comprehension. It connects so many elements into a perceivable whole.
There’s a book on linguistics I like called Language Versus Reality. It makes the helpful point that there is a difference between brutal reality and metaphorical reality. Micronaming exists in brutal reality – you can kick the rocks you name. The digital information architectures exist in places that are metaphorical – things can both fall into smaller pieces and be named in new and newer words.
Attention
One effect of this is how attention works.
In a micronamed environment, attention is fundamental to connecting self to place and context.
One of the core pieces of advice about not getting lost is paying attention as you move along so you can backtrack to a place you knew where you were.
Attention in the digital environment is much harder as the landscape and the platforms shift and morph. The human stress is trying to microname and find place when all the elements around you are shifting and changing.