recycling your thoughts post after post? September 17, 2001 6:02 AM Subscribe
"My ideals are strewn throughout this site like shards of glass from a broken vase." (fooljay). What's policy for recycling your thoughts between threads? Consider them said, and run down your Big Idea Battery? Artfully paraphrase them to disguise lazy ctrl-C/V work? What wouldn't be acceptable (easiest form of the question to answer, I suppose).
Here's the link. In these days when so many of the threads are so similar, this is a great subject to bring up. I suppose if I were to make a lengthy, well-thought-out post similar fooljay's earlier comment in the thread, I might refer to it with a link if I felt the need to make a similar point in a later thread. Personally, I would draw the line at actually resorting to copy/paste, though I could see where it might be tempting. IMO, if you don't have the energy or interest to reword it for the thread at hand, don't post.
posted by gimli at 9:29 AM on September 17, 2001
posted by gimli at 9:29 AM on September 17, 2001
I'm not sure if I'm being scolded or if you're saying that my post brings up a good point. (So I'll assume the latter)
All I can say, and I think that this may apply to many of us this week on Mefi, is that I have been participating in hundreds of different discussions which tax the mind and one's ideologies in subtly different ways. While certainly some of what I have said has been repeated, it has also been changed and molded by both the thread it's written in and the state of my thinking at the time.
When I wrote that entry, I did not mean that I had the same thought posted in many different threads, but instead that while the totality of my contribution to Mefi over the last week might be able to capture my actual thinking, the scattered activity that is inherent in this medium has created a mosaic of snapshots of my thoughts and the evolution of them.
What I would love, in a perfect world, is to write the perfect essay and be done with it. Unfortunately that would require me to be at an endpoint, or at least at equilibrium in my analysis.
Recent events have disturbed that equilibrium and moved the endpoint further away at a more rapid pace than normal everyday life. The great discussion here has accelerated that, has pushed my own intellectual evolution.
We are all learning and healing and the progress of that activity is, interestingly enough, captured on Metafilter.
For the record, I have never ever copy/pasted. I have linked to my own thoughts when they were appropriate usually only as a supplement to something more specific in a current thread.
posted by fooljay at 2:18 PM on September 17, 2001
All I can say, and I think that this may apply to many of us this week on Mefi, is that I have been participating in hundreds of different discussions which tax the mind and one's ideologies in subtly different ways. While certainly some of what I have said has been repeated, it has also been changed and molded by both the thread it's written in and the state of my thinking at the time.
When I wrote that entry, I did not mean that I had the same thought posted in many different threads, but instead that while the totality of my contribution to Mefi over the last week might be able to capture my actual thinking, the scattered activity that is inherent in this medium has created a mosaic of snapshots of my thoughts and the evolution of them.
What I would love, in a perfect world, is to write the perfect essay and be done with it. Unfortunately that would require me to be at an endpoint, or at least at equilibrium in my analysis.
Recent events have disturbed that equilibrium and moved the endpoint further away at a more rapid pace than normal everyday life. The great discussion here has accelerated that, has pushed my own intellectual evolution.
We are all learning and healing and the progress of that activity is, interestingly enough, captured on Metafilter.
For the record, I have never ever copy/pasted. I have linked to my own thoughts when they were appropriate usually only as a supplement to something more specific in a current thread.
posted by fooljay at 2:18 PM on September 17, 2001
Your post brings up a good point. I knew exactly what you meant and felt the same (fewer shards). I wondered if the luminaries had a policy response.
posted by RichLyon at 11:34 AM on September 18, 2001
posted by RichLyon at 11:34 AM on September 18, 2001
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posted by gd779 at 9:15 AM on September 17, 2001