Wednesday, January 29, 2014
More on "email interview" invites, and a note on plagiarism
I still get a lot of requests to interview people,
review books, and the like.
Even with my measured level of “public success”, I
can appreciate what a hiring manager going through resumes deals with. The fact
is, even with non-spam, there are so many emails that with most of them I get
as far as two seconds on the subject line, and maybe ten seconds to look at the
message if I even open it. Imagine if I
were a manager filling a position.
The problem with a lot of what I get is that it is
too “narrow”. What doesn’t work, for me
at least, is “playing victim”, or claiming that some group of self-help steps
will make your life all right, or that there is some formula to save the
world. No, some trick to avoid being
seen by the NSA will not, by itself, get my attention either.
I simply don’t like to be recruited, and I don’t
recruit people. This sounds like the old
“winning converts” v. “winning arguments” – a debate within the Libertarian
Party of Minnesota around 1998. Those
days of ballot-access petitioning, which women were better at than men, come to
mind.
Of course, some people would see my original focus
as “narrow”. In the 1990s, the “gays in
the military” issue (leading to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, repealed in 2011)
seemed very narrow to most people in a world – pardon me, a country, the US,
for some other countries like Israel have it -- without compulsory military
service. But the big issues blew right
out of this core like blossoms: forced
intimacy, social cohesion, participating in sharing risks, and even “being
scoped”. A lot of that energy has moved
over to debate on key Internet issues today (like downstream liability). 9/11 and various other crises (including
financial) have certainly given value to my original attention to this issue.
One other thing.
There has been a case where a blog posting of mine just mentioning the
now ended CWTV series “Smallville” (Jan. 13, 2014) got plagiarized. The blog that plagiarized might be viewed as
a spam in some circles, or it might not be.
I can imagine rationalizations for what was done. To find more details on my take on it, go to
my new “doaskdotellnotes.com” site, which is accessed on my “doaskdotell.com”
main page (Jan. 28).
Actually, I’ve seen plenty of snippets of my movie
reviews on other sites before (finding them when I Google my name with the name
of a movie in a “long tail” search – as compared to a head search), and never
paid much attention until yesterday.
What’s clear is that “selling yourself” on the
Internet is a variable experience. Some
people have to make a living on the web, and are very sensitive to copyright
infringement, and may go close to the line in committing it themselves. They may say that they have families to
support when I don’t. Other people might
benefit from the exposure that “plagiarism” gives them. That’s particularly the case if people have income
from other sources (including conventional investments in securities) that they
can plow into self-publishing to say exactly what they want. In this sense, capitalism is still a good
thing for free speech. But the rules
seem to lie in the beholder.
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