It’s About Making Babies!

Liz at Successful and Outstanding Bloggers asks Bloggy Question 57, about a business blogger posting comments on the contents of a business book, following point by point. The question is how to communicate any disappointment to your friend, the blogger in question.

Liz makes the point that normal practices of acknowledging significant references should hold true for a business blog. (My restatement of Liz’s comments.)

I wonder how this practice came about. Before lawyers got into the copyright business, academic works generally enforced the practice of referencing existing and known references. In part this was to simplify validating work being reviewed. Today the practice has taken on a ‘pay the ogre’ obsession with royalties, plagiarism, licenses, and claiming credit. Some of this probably has value in improving civilization, the collective body of information of the world, and advancing mankind’s knowledge. But mostly it harkens back to ‘my pointy stick is more fearsome than yours, so you better give me that carcass’ aggression.

So where did the academics decide to agree on the practice? I suspect that instructors imposed, as they do today, on students an expansion of their assignment. The instructor wanted to assure the student knew how to check and use base reference material, and providing a list of the references used simplified checking whether the student found references A, B, and C. I am sure that the second student with that assignment did the same thing I did in college – compare notes to be sure all the needed references got included in the list. Sometimes we even look at the reference.

But turn this around. A scholar with low self-esteem will be all to glad to ascribe additional authority, that of accepted, ‘proven’ sources, to as much of a portion of their work as possible. It is common to hear a complaint of research that the work lacks creativity, that little information is published that goes beyond the references cited.

In one sense, I argue that the practice of including references with an article is an expression of low self esteem. Institutionalized.

Lately there has been much angst among bloggers about reviews, references, and posts for pay. Where the paid relationship of the product to the blogger was concealed or simply not acknowledged, some people felt deceived.

Liz seems to feel that her blogger, by not revealing the book she uses to generate her blog, is similarly deceiving her audience.

Possibly the blogger didn’t think of including the reference, just overlooked the idea. Possibly the book that supposedly provides guidance for the blogger was written from the blogger’s earlier works – nothing is known to disprove this question. And possibly the blogger provides sufficient insight and explanation to go far beyond the contents of the book. Or maybe the blogger is confident enough of her work to let it stand alone, without reference to ‘fundamental’ accepted and acknowledged experts. Heck, for all I know, the blogger is systematically correcting the contents of the book!

No one should benefit from theft. Not from taking a purse from a shopping cart (*don’t* leave that cart and purse for a second, ladies!), or from copying someone else’s work and claiming to be the author. But there is a difference between a slavish imposition of an institution of low self esteem among scholars, and the legitimate copyright protection of published work.