Where did you find that?
Austin Kleon⤴ wrote in his book Show Your Work! a lot about the importance of sharing the origin of the things you find on the internet.
Crediting work in our copy-and-paste age of reblogs and retweets can seem like a futile effort, but it’s worth it, and it’s the right thing to do. You should always share the work of others as if it were your own, treating it with respect and care.
But maybe even as important as linking the original source is linking how you found the thing. There are so many times when because of following "via" or a chain of reblogs that I could discover so many new blogs I liked.
This is not only decent in terms of respect for the author, but it is also helpful for others because they can walk the paths you're walking to find your inspiration. It is about making it easy for others to find similar things. And it is helpful for the people who curated the inspiration along the way.
Citation As Pilgrimage
One of the specific ideas mentioned in this episode clicked in my head with citations as well: the long-held many-cultures notion that it is the duty of the traveler who succeeds to come back and share with those at the beginning of the trail. You are required to pass along what you have learned to others embarking on the journey you have survived. This communal and socially shared obligation is an uncomfortable fit in an isolation-biased world. Do you owe other people your knowledge? I think my answer is yes. We do owe each other. Why? Because my mind was built with other people’s knowledge. (Cat Hicks⤴)
Many people will say that cittaions are kind of the ultimate feminist technology because they're really talking about a social network of how ideas come together through community and not because of some individual genius. So I've been thinking about ways of social citation, oral histories and community citations (Mindy Seu in Dazed)
Connecting with the world
But actually, what I’m trying to get at is the opposite of doing things for yourself. Doing something for yourself sounds the same as doing something because you think it will reflect positively on you. What I love seeing is people pointing their attention out into the world and doing things for the world, in service of ideas and not an expected outcome.
To me, the only way to do that effectively is to understand what connects you to the world, what draws you in, what your radar is. This could take a whole lifetime (and ideally it does). In order to understand what your radar is, you have to pay attention. Paying attention means not only recognizing where your gaze is focused, but understanding why it’s focused there. (Charles Broskoski⤴)