Sunday, June 29, 2025

On Arbitrariness of Labels

 There's something fundamentally wrong with classifications/categories/genres or as you can call them generally, labels. What's wrong about them is two-fold. People's inability to understand the arbitrariness of the process of putting things into different buckets to the extent that they don't like things which aren't too easy to put into a bucket, and also people who create things that are too easy to put in a bucket. Labels (classification / genres / categorization) rarely do justice with a good work.

I wanted to specify it down, but I am unable too. Every good creative work (book/movie/game/whatever) has such of its identity derived from its unique idiosyncracy that it feels wrong to use the regular labels with them.

But the strange thing about this is that labels are useful. They serve a useful function to make a lot of information manageable, which makes me realize that the problem arises when people start giving labels more importance than what they hold, and that probably happens because most of mass content has too little of an identity of its own that defining them with labels become the norm.


Any thoughts or questions?

Write to me aiktamseel@gmail.com and I will reply ^_^