Like migratory birds, the New York Times returns to a perennial favourite topic: university student behaviour. This time, the subject is plagiarism. I’ve seen the link twittered and blogged about (hat tip to Historiann for some of the best of the blogging).
The Times, as is often their wont, excuses current day students by claiming that this really isn’t their fault — it’s those darned interwebs as article author, Trip Gabriel, explains:
The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
But, as Historiann notes in her pithy commentary,
It’s not hard to understand that if you take words from someone else and put your name on them–even if you can’t find the name of an author for attribution–that’s plagiarism, and the definition of it never goes out of style.
Interestingly enough, plagiarism is a persistent problem in remix culture. Research any fan community (from before or during the online era) and you’ll find evidence of someone who plagiarized others’ work (whether baldly republishing it as their own or doing so with minimal changes — new characters or in a new universe or a new song with a sloppy recut of someone else’s video footage).
What amuses me is that most of these will still include the traditional fan creator’s note that the characters/universe belong to the original author/cast/corporate body. There’ll also be someone who, when the plagiarism is uncovered, steps up to defend the plagiarist by saying “this is all derivative, anyway, so how is it hurting anyone?”
The impulse to plagiarize in fan works is even more mystifying to me than in academe — there’s no assignment hanging over your head, no requirement to be completed. There’s even a common fan cultural practice, reccing (recommending), that is focused on sharing/reviewing other good fanworks. But still, some people plagiarize fanworks rather than rec.
As the senior quoted in the article points out quite aptly, writing is hard. We know that — it takes time, it takes practice, it takes research or some effort to acquire the knowledge to flesh out the piece with facts or details. Good writing takes rewriting — the revision process is something that staggers many novices who’re unable or unwilling to disengage themselves from what they’ve produced. To put something raw and untested out there is scary. To be brave enough to share your writing, whether with a classmate, a peer, a professor or the world wide web? That takes guts and, you know!, the actual accomplishment of the writing.
Procrastination, perfectionism, denigration (this is just history/English/whatever, that isn’t that hard/important/part of my major, so I don’t have to work at it) — whatever the impulses leading one to plagiarize, one can always say that the appeal of the no-effort path to good marks or high praise seems to be what is most at work here. It’s not some new internet-age paradigm of originality and identity. It’s plain old plagiarism and we’re not letting it slide by, whatever the excuse!
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