Another Minute of Micro-Fame and Source Amnesia

Sunday afternoon, I saw this retweet by Andrew Kroll of Mother Jones, whom I started following during the Wisconsin Capitol protests:


Here's the original tweet:


I went to see who this @joelhousman guy was, check out some of his tweets, and decided to follow him and see what he had to say. He's a web developer in the D.C. area whose words tend to cover either politics or his work.

Soon after, I saw this tweet from Housman:


Then, just about 4 hours after his original tweet:



And a link to this graphic of his Twitter stats:


Later that night, I saw this remixed tweet from someone completely unconnected to Housman in my Twitterverse -- one of the teachers from Diane Ravitch's network:


Then I saw this on Facebook Monday, from a local friend who has moved to Atlanta, who is neither a teacher nor a web developer:


Then these two today on Facebook:





Noticeably absent from all but the first retweet was any credit to the guy who came up with it. I only know Housman is the source because a journalist happened to be the first one I saw to retweet it.

Housman says on his Twitter feed that he had 5,000 retweets, but obviously, those got remixed, changed up, and sent out again by a lot of other people, if it's trickling into Facebook without his name and in different versions.

I'm fascinated by this type of source amnesia.

The best example I know is the case of my friend Nancy, who was a child care teacher and early childhood trainer. She wrote a piece that she used to hand out in her training sessions. At some point, it got typed into a computer by someone who didn't know or care who wrote it, and posted to the interweb, and now Nancy will never get credit for this example of her creativity. Maybe you've heard of it: It's called the Toddler Property Laws (1. If I like it, it's mine. 2 If it's in my hand, it's mine...). 127,000 hits on Google last time I checked.

I wonder how Joel Housman feels about it. From his more recent tweets, I'd say he seems amused and maybe just a bit bewildered. He keeps warning his new followers that he's as much a web geek as a political commentator, so they should be prepared for a wave of HTML5 references -- acknowledging the newly felt pressure to perform in the media circus we live in.

Update: One day after posting this, I've seen it four more times on Facebook. Now is the time where I lose track of the total.