I swear it was here a minute ago!

Citations are the lifeblood of academia: who you cite, what you cite, when you cite…it’s the site of all contention, creation, and collaboration. But in this new media age, what happens when you’re examining a web site and its activity only to discover that having referenced it, it may no longer exist. Ah…your word stands alone as witness to a cyber event that perhaps is long gone or migrated to some other nook on cyberspace. Also, it’s painful to reference a webpage without getting into the messiness of copyright…who owns that space? Is it the user, the platform owner, an organization that perhaps the user belongs to or all of the above? It’s the hell of online copyright. And things can get even more complicated. For instance, I need to reference an image online that a user was looking at. That happens to be the photograph of a painting of Mona Lisa. So apparently, even though the original may be out of copyright, the photograph is not. The delightful chase begins…starting with the photographer and then the organization who commissioned that photographer …not to forget the expenses that may incur in gaining permission to reproduce a “painting” in print when in fact, I’m not even interested in the painting but what it represents to the user. Mona Lisa is incidental to my study…and apparently so is the cost. So instead, I will trust the imagination of the reader as they use my words to imagine Mona Lisa in all her glory. Old fashioned stand alone print is sadly more affordable in the 21st century.