I never said that

For over a decade, I've received email notifications from Google Scholar alerting me to anything new which meets the criteria of the search term: belshaw intitle:"digital literacy". It's gratifying to see my doctoral work continuing to be quoted, given that I kind of stumbled into the whole thing. I'm glad it's still of some use.

The vast majority of people are doing great things building on other people's work. Others... not so much. For a bit of fun, I considered quoting some of the more egregious examples of my name being put next to things I never said, but given that we're entering a world of LLM-powered search, perhaps that's not a good idea. I'm not sure that the algorithms of our AI overlords are yet clever enough to identify sarcastic and ironic quoting.

I know plenty of people who would get annoyed or angry by their name or work being quoted incorrectly. I simply find it somewhat amusing. As Epictetus famously said in his Enchridion:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Ultimately, people will do what they like with "my" work and ideas, and given that I haven't got the time, money, or inclination to do anything about it, I might as well explicitly allow them to do what they will. Life is short. As a result, my thesis, like this blog is CC0 licensed.

Most academic publishing, as currently constituted, is a one-way street. It blows my mind that we're 20 years on from the dawn of Web 2.0 and academic publishing is primarily a read-only format. While I'm not that bothered, it would be useful to occasionally be able to comment and remind authors "I never said that".