My very first DISCONTENT column was about content and context. Three years later, context remains an important topic, ripe for a revisit. It's one that affects academic and public libraries in troubling ways- but it also affects every creator and user of econtent. Suppose someone told you this: "Walt Crawford says he's an early adopter type who uses every technology possible and tries to wrap his life around it all." A quick reader or casual blog-ger could plausibly make that highly implausible statement. Worse, they could back it up by quoting those very words (albeit with different pronouns) from my February 2004 Cites & Insights zine. While the equivalent sentence, in the first person, did appear there, it appeared as part of two paragraphs quoted from Jenny Levine's "Shifted Librarian" weblog. I didn't say it about myself. Thus, to quote the sentence on its own removes it from its context on one level. OK then, what if, instead, this theoretical blogger said, "Jenny Levine says she's an early adopter type who..." But Jenny Levine didn't say it about herself either. She was quoting from Joi Ito's weblog. At this point, the casual reader or reporter would be quoting out of context by two levels.
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