Educators complain about plagiarism. But it is not principally because material is too readily available that students copy and paste material from the internet to their papers. It’s because new forms of authorships are emerging online, anthropologist Susan D. Blum writes in Anthropology News March 2008.
Blum has done ethnographic research on plagiarism and college culture for three years at “Saint Pastoral’s” University.
Social websites like Wikipedia challenge the romantic notion of the author as the individual genius:
While the romantic notion of the author emphasized creation in a vacuum, without influence, touched only by inspiration from the individual’s genius, the new collectivized idea of the author celebrates the kind of creativity that comes from selecting, from accumulating a pastiche, a patchwork, a sample of others’ work. The line between creation and what “copyright fundamentalists” regard as theft is now completely— and consciously—fluid.
(…)
Collectively, one after another, contributors add to or edit Wikipedia articles, without directly requesting credit or payment. The living product is quite essentially collaborative, an accretion of many people’s words belonging to everyone and Common Sense and anthropological Sense no one simultaneously.
(…)
Sharing music, video, text and images is routine and simple on the “digital commons” with YouTube, Flickr and other file-sharing interfaces. Items often follow a circuitous path before they end up on some- one’s iPod or hard drive.
Maybe educators should care lass about plagiarism? Blum concludes:
Faculty can attempt to enforce traditional academic citation norms, but we are well advised to recognize that a large portion of the students we encounter do not share traditional academic values of originality, singularity and individualism in intellectual creation. In the area of authorship, educators’ common sense is not necessarily students’ common sense.
In some ways our students have become folk anthropologists, speaking out about the impossibility of singularity, the shared quality of discourse, the reality of fragments of texts incorporated into every utterance (or written document) and the collective nature of cultural creation. Now that’s a story!
>> read the whole article “The Internet, the Self, Authorship and Plagiarism” (pdf)
This is one of five articles on “Online Engagement” in Anthropology News March 2008.
SEE ALSO:
Interview with Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship
New media and anthropology – AAA meeting part III
Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement
Educators complain about plagiarism. But it is not principally because material is too readily available that students copy and paste material from the internet to their papers. It's because new forms of authorships are emerging online, anthropologist Susan D. Blum…
