On reblogging thepoliticalnotebook's 'This Week in War'

thepoliticalnotebook knows how much I appreciate her work - because I send her fan mail - and I ask for her understanding that I mean no disrespect by this post. Her ‘This Week in War’ series has become a wonderful weekly anticipated post, but tumblrs, we need to talk about reblogging this.

I hope politicalprof won’t mind me envoking his sentiment when he became a #politics editor and queried  for quality original contribution political blogs, not just reblogs. When people reblog ‘This Week in War’ without further comment, I feel we have a substaintial issue: original contribution via blog - academics know what I’m talking about, and while we are at it can we talk about original sourcing of ‘This Week in War’!! I think we should press the tumblr political, academic, and intellectual community for more original contribution and further quality growth when reblogging.

I argue that when individuals and NGOs reblog something as popular as ‘This Week in War’, there needs to be an elaboration on what thepolitcalnotebook has so considerately and carefully provided us with, not just reblogging. There needs to be a contribution to what rebloggers found particularly engaging about her post. This is how we can evolve our tumblr  community; see SIGJ2 Writing Collective (2009), ‘What Can We Do: the Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities’, in Antipode (2012), pp 1-4.

If you (the blogger) don’t have a contribution, debate, further information, or follow up to add, can we just all assume that we’ve read ‘This Week in War’?

This isn’t to diminish the amount of ‘attention’ ‘This Week in War’ receives (by likes and reblogs), we can still ‘like’ … but is it really, really necessary to reblog something we’ve all read and appreciated? If there’s no new contribution to be made? What compels you to reblog? I suggest highlighting that section and contributing a new discussion or new material.

…I feel like a journal editor here.

Thoughts?