Sharing, Oh Sharing.

From the first play-date we encounter at age 1 (or whenever it was that your parents decided to find you friends other than your stuffed animals), we are taught to share. The reasons to encourage this action? To keep you from hitting your new friend in an effort to get your toy back. To teach you to be a giver. To help you practice your patience. To teach you a skill that you will need to utilize over the Internet one day?!

I never really thought about it this way until now, but without sharing, the way in which we all compile our own unique storage "box" of information from our interactions with a different people, lessons, etc., we would probably never have as diverse of a collection of knowledge. If it weren't for these situations of sharing everything and anything we can... we would have to rely on our brains to pick up and seek out new experiences to learn first hand on our own... and no one has time for that.

One of the videos said something like, "Sharing, learn from it. Be inspired by it." I think once you have been exposed to something, there is no way that you can come up with another thing that is entirely new. You have been influenced and while people exposed to your product encouraged by the inspiration may not know of its roots, it still is based off of a work that already existed... so do we need to cite our inspiration too?

Should I cite this?

In my own life, especially when it comes to my blog and serving as a mentor for Columbia's marketing association, I often find myself relaying information I have gathered from my own mentors. When I share tips that I feel are very unique, I can't help but explain who I got the tip from. Sometimes I wonder if this is necessary; did these people really come up with these tips on their own? Except for the examples they use that prove their advice works, the tips are the kind of phrases that put seemingly common sense principles into a relevant perspective. So who is to say if there is a need to cite these people online or offline.

On the topic of sharing, I have also noticed that many of the e-books published on social media marketing how-to offer the same information said in a different way. This material is copyrighted and can make the "authors" a lot of money, but the concepts and strategies are not really anything new. How are they able to site the tips as theirs when it seems like the same information is spilled out in blogs and across other mediums? I understand that these people have tested out some of these methods and there results are what is copy written ... but what happens if someone else has experienced the situation and writes about it? Who owns that experience?

As you can see in my personal blog post from this week, a big part of my life has been crafting. One of my favorite things to do is create collages from magazine tare-sheets. Magazines offer the opportunity to "remix" their words, artwork, background colors; every piece of the magazine can really be repurposed. As an overall collage may present a visual summary of the magazine due to color schemes and voice of the magazine, I often consider the collages to be my own design and have even thought about selling them. The problem is that I do not think you can repurpose any images for resale from the magazines.