Intellectual culture’s self-citing stems from a fear of being forgotten

Evidence

So much of intellectual and activist life today is about credit claiming. I do it; I’ve done it repeatedly in these pages. I wrote that. I said that. That’s my phrase. My buzzword. My hashtag. I was horrified the first time I noticed a colleague self-cite, embedding quotes from his earlier work in a column—“as I wrote here [link] and here [link].” Why was he quoting himself? Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time: “As I wrote here” … “See my earlier tweet” … “Just bumping this up.” We have to do it, or so many of us believe—we are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don’t remind people of what we have said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 221

Categorization

• SEED: Possible essay angle: self-citation as a symptom of attention scarcity economics — how the anxiety of the ‘roaring river’ drives the very narcissism that fragments discourse.
• XREF: Relates to the reader’s existing interest in information overload and the capacity for independent thought (from the noise/soundscape cluster). — connects to: Grade obsession springs from failure fear that also grips professors