Sourcing, Resourcing, and Sourcelessness
Social media have changed rules of speech, behaviour, manner and attention. Universities are having more and more problems in their capacities to monopolise and police/ safeguard/ enforce (depending on your politics) their role as sources of knowledge and ideas. These trends are increasingly making their cross-overs from things of internet to internet of things, hence with it also cross-over between material and immaterial values.
There are new owners and gatekeepers of the "source" (i.e. academic citation indexes which were the original attention and recognition-based currency that have academics working in 24/7 sweat shops conditions).
Especially when people are less and less inclined to check sources (Like me here, not doing my due diligence and leaving you to check! But I am not paid either!), much less to cite sources with agreed formats (i.e., citation methods), and even much less in complying with traditional academic circulation routes which may well cheat you of being the original source!
Hence there are also issues of authenticity and originality.
The stakes of claiming being the source couldn't be higher, notably in a system that only rewards the source originator with everything else henceforth as merely derivative valueless replicators competing with only limited attention span (like this post here!).
We're moving into one library (Google), one economy (battle between Amazon & Alibaba), one nation (Facebook), one university (ResearchGate?),...
Apple is in an intermediate position of a major existentialist crises. Still Steve Jobs managed to secured patent rights for his Apple Store glass staircase (come down Cinderella!).
At a time when the rhetoric about school reforms are still concerned with producing a more value-added knowledge worker (creative!), we have no sustainable and workable answers to increasing problems of creator's rights and sources, much less how to translate into one's remuneration.
When technologies inevitably piggy backs on top of one idea after another, at what point should the descendants of the tribe who invented stairs, wheel, fire, agrarian cultivation, etc be actually paid loyalties?
For all our discourse on open source, what happens to sourcelessness like this very post? Especially when my other jobs stop allowing me to put bread/ rice/ pizzas (cheap as they've become with increasing redundant labour) on the table?
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