Digital Stockpilers: We See You

 A short little post for this week and a note that I am not going to be writing a blog next week because I am on vacation and I would like to distance myself from my computer as much as possible. 

This week's post is on the tension between open source materials, sharing ideas in a virtual space, and what I am seeing more and more now which is digital stockpiling. I am thinking about this because I have seen a lot of Tweets about how folk's scholarship is not being acknowledged and how information exchanges happen much more rapidly in the virtual realm and that the originator of the idea is lost in the sharing. 

This is seen when folk repost a TikTok without tagging the originator and that person receives all the views and all the accolades when they are not the creator of the great thing. Very often the originator is a Black or Indigenous or disabled person and very often the person sharing is not. The socio-cultural weight and importance of that is something we really need to engage with and how colonizing someone's work in the virtual realm is just very icky. 

What I also see happening now is someone goes to a conference and asks for the slides or resources that someone has presented (which is cool and definitely an accessibility plus), but then randomly a few months later those same ideas get repurposed and repackaged in the person who did the asking's presentation or professional development series without any acknowledgment. I think they think we don't see this happening, but trust me-we do and we talk about it offline- a lot. And this is also sadly the reason why folk are so hesitant to have things like accessibility copies because folk do unethical things with them. 

I am all for sharing resources and information. I am very anti-gatekeeping of knowledge. But I am also very very pro acknowledgement. So for example, right now I am going to acknowledge my colleague Dianne who noted as I spoke to her about this this week that this often happens when folk have what she called a "casual interest" in a topic and then they use this material as a way to demonstrate specialized knowledge that they may not have. 

I have real concerns about this from a modelling and pedagogy point of view as well. How is one supposed to model good academic integrity practices with students when the information that is shared is from a conference that was attended, but the person giving the paper is not acknowledged? Imagine how much more students could see conferences as a space of knowledge exchange and reflection if that information was flagged as coming from a talk. 

I know that the pandemic has brought this digital stockpiling more to the forefront because folk just don't know when they will need some sort of information in an ever changing pandemic landscape so there is a tendency to just save everything. This is a trauma reaction that often happens when things are in constant movement. It is definitely okay to save things and to have it at the ready for possible future use. But, and I am going to put this in all caps, YOU HAVE AN ETHICAL OBLIGATION TO CITE WHERE YOU FOUND THAT INFORMATION AND THE SCHOLARS WHO INFORM YOUR SCHOLARSHIP.

I know that academe tries to push us to know and do all the things. But you can't know and do all the things because the folk who actually specialize in things you have lifted will know where that information came from and know who to avoid at conferences and events in the future. I also know that it is really much more difficult to be creative in pandemic times when we don't have time to reflect on possibilities. But lifting other people's ideas is not it, and will never be it.

So I guess the moral of the story is: sharing information awesome, asking for resources great and yay accessibility, not acknowledging that your great new idea is not yours or new at all not cool, and think about the precedent that leaves for the students you may be teaching.