Metadata as the True Currency of Travel

To understand why the Jet2 jingle proliferated so widely I need to remember that the unit of cultural exchange online is not content but metadata. As Marcia Bates reminded us, information retrieval depends less on the semantic richness of the content itself and more on its points of access: its subject descriptors, keywords and classificatory structures. A 30-second advert alone is not destined for memetic fame. A 30-second advert with the right tags, captions and remix affordances however, is ripe for circulation.

On TikTok, hashtags operate as paratextual signifiers and classification devices, forming folksonomies….bottom-up taxonomies created through collective tagging. #jet2holiday, #nothingbeats, #holdmyhand: these hashtags are categorisations and also boarding passes and each click or use admits the user onto a memetic flightpath, with the TikTok algorithm as air-traffic controller and mischievous tour guide.

Boarding Passes, Check-Ins and Algorithmic Destinations

In traditional information science, cataloguing provides order to collections. Melvil Dewey once promised that his decimal system could bring the world’s knowledge into neat hierarchical shelves. TikTok by contrast, offers an airport of perpetual departure lounges, where hashtags are tickets to unpredictable destinations.

Using #jet2holiday may deposit us alongside parasailing mishaps, while #nothingbeats might land us among actors parodying delayed departures. Each tag is a classification scheme but perhaps unlike the Dewey Decimal System, it is unstable, dynamic and really participatory. The folksonomy shifts mid-flight, responding to user remix and algorithmic turbulence.

Information retrieval theorists such as Salton and McGill (1983) stressed the importance of indexing for efficient search. TikTok demonstrates an alternative: indexing not for efficiency but for serendipity. Boarding passes in this memetic airline are stamped not with destinations but with probabilities….our videos might reach travellers in Stansted or just as likely, a K-pop fan in Seoul. In this sense, hashtags and tags are probabilistic boarding passes, classification systems designed not to reduce uncertainty but to amplify it.

Commercial Ephemera Becomes Cultural Capital

Pierre Bourdieu (1986) distinguished between economic, cultural and social capital. Jet2’s original advert was a bid for economic capital: book now, save £50 per person, up to £200 for a family of four. Yet through its memetic transformation, it accrued cultural capital: status, recognisability, belonging. TikTok users who appropriate the sound demonstrate not their purchasing intent but their cultural fluency. To know the meme is to hold the boarding pass of participation.

This transformation occurs through metadata. Without tags, captions and algorithmic indexing, the Jet2 sound would remain commercial detritus. With metadata it becomes a passport into collective creativity. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999) remind us, classification systems are never neutral: they shape access and also meaning. By tagging their video with #jet2holiday, users reclassify an airline jingle into a meme. The sound no longer indexes cheap flights but travel mishaps, ironic failures and playful community. Metadata thus converts commercial ephemera into cultural capital.

Memetic Folksonomy

What makes TikTok fascinating for information scientists I think is its resistance to rigid taxonomies. Traditional classification systems (Dewey, Library of Congress….) are hierarchical, prescriptive, slow to change. TikTok hashtags form a folksonomy: chaotic, participatory and endlessly generative. Thomas Vander Wal (2007) described folksonomies as democratised systems of classification, producing bottom-up sense-making.

In the case of Jet2, the folksonomy is playful chaos. The same sound indexes aspirational holiday fantasies and slapstick aquatic disasters. To borrow from Luciano Floridi, one might call this an “infosphere” in which the ontology of the object….an advert jingle shifts according to metadata tags and TikTok’s infosphere transforms travel infrastructure into memetic infrastructure.

It is tempting to ask: who is the librarian of TikTok’s global collection of Jet2 memes? The answer of course, is no one. The platform’s algorithm is closer to a mischievous baggage handler, tossing cultural suitcases onto whatever conveyor belt seems promising.

Information Retrieval as Leisure Activity

Classical information retrieval (IR) frameworks emphasised efficiency: the ability to retrieve the most relevant document given a query. But TikTok’s memetic culture illustrates a shift from retrieval-as-utility to retrieval-as-leisure. The aim is not to find the correct video but to enjoy an endless layover in the airport of cultural recombination.

Here metadata performs a dual function. First, it provides entry points into memetic communities. Second it ensures discoverability within a platform where billions of sounds compete for attention. Jess Glynne’s Hold My Hand is not unique but with the “nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” overlay and strategic tagging, it becomes legible to the algorithm. As Bates (2002) argued, information seeking is a berry-picking process….users forage across shifting landscapes, following trails of relevance and TikTok users berry-pick through hashtags-as-boarding-passes, gathering not documents but vibes.

The Ephemerality of Viral Passports

Yet like budget flights, memetic boarding passes are fleeting. Google Trends shows Jet2 searches peaking in July 2025. Come autumn, another sound will dominate TikTok. This ephemerality raises archival questions: how do we preserve viral metadata holidays?

Archivists have long debated how to capture web ephemera and the Jet2 case forces us to consider not just preserving the sound but the metadata ecosystem that gave it cultural capital. Without the hashtags, captions and remix structures, future researchers will encounter only a stranded advert, stripped of its memetic boarding passes. In this sense metadata is paratext and also the very condition of cultural memory.

Conclusion: Pack Metadata, Not the Bags

Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday….except, perhaps, a metadata holiday. What appears on the surface as a viral airline jingle is, from an information science perspective, an illustration of how classification, indexing, retrieval underpin meme culture. Hashtags function as boarding passes, granting entry into folksonomic flightpaths; metadata transforms commercial ephemera into cultural capital; and the algorithm acts as air-traffic controller and trickster guide.

If as Geoffrey Nunberg (1996) once said, classification is the invisible infrastructure of knowledge, then TikTok memes remind us that this infrastructure is neither neutral nor stable. It is playful, chaotic, capable of turning a Leeds-based airline into the unlikely steward of summer’s cultural capital. Next time you hear “nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” remember: you are not just a traveller but also a passenger on the metadata airline, boarding pass in hand.