Citations: Facade?

Here's something interesting: Some of my friends who write blogs always put down ideas as if they had them for themselves. It's strange because I always want to cite stuff. It's part of the creative process to learn as much as possible and then enter that in as a synthesis, a syllogism, or a synergy. On the other hand, there's some things that I would like to say using people's stuff that people would never want to be caught dead using. Furthermore, if a fact is a fact (which I philosophically believe is true), then it really does not matter how we "post" or "use" such a fact, it's just common knowledge. There seems to be a finder's fee though. We want to honor the people who get something for us, even if it is just information.

For example, when telling a joke, it is important to start some kind of rhythm so that there is what people call "comedic timing." This can, however, make the joke really a pain in the ass.

Opposing this of course is most any academic paper, whereupon sources have to be cited, hopefully on a works' cited page. Come to think of it right now, though, this whole work of citations can be a real pain, too. It just breaks (reading) rhythm (with words) so (see sidenote) that (see footnote) you (see endnote) can't (you know what I'm talking about) get through the thing without getting bored, really pissed off, or at least a little bit deterred.

This is the problem with Spinoza's masterpiece, The Ethics, which strives to cite every arguments' logical order using axioms and proofs. People are so tired by the end of reading it that they usually just take his word for it. Argument point goes to Spinoza.

The problems with this are immense. So there's a balance between citing and not citing, especially when it's right and when it's wrong. No one should take anyone else's stuff. One thing that happened when I was reading one of my friends' blogs was that I increasingly saw that the advice I was giving her...she was using it as her own ideas!!! It's free conversation, her argument went implicitly. But those were my words! It was as if she liked the idea enough to write it out, but she couldn't write me in.

Writing this complaint, however, I can't help but think that I'm almost doing the same thing. I'm doing this to preserve anonymity of the person I'm complaining about, but truly you could do all this in order to intentionally obscure or make ambiguous. Like Spinoza's readers, people just kind of take your word for it. Franken makes a point like this in Lies and the Lying Liars Who tell Them.