Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

Consider the following statements:

A: "This is a book about Dresden."
B: "This is a book about Dresden,
and it goes in the category 'East Germany'."

That second sentence seems so obvious, but East Germany actually turned out to be an unstable category. Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions. It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear, so when you're saying that the small thing is contained by the large thing, you're actually mixing radically different kinds of entities. We pretend that 'country' refers to a physical area the same way 'city' does, but it's not true, as we know from places like the former Yugoslavia.

- Clay Shirky