barthel:

Cut, paste, plagiarize

Me in Salon this week.

The basic conflict here is that legacy media strictly forbids plagiarism, but, as Slacktory’s Nick Douglas put it in a recent post, everything on the Internet gets stolen. Writing is copy-and-pasted without attribution onto new websites, pictures are reposted with any credits, and all the world’s content is freely available. And that’s not conceptualized as a problem; such theft is an inherent quality of the medium. Information wants to be free, and Web culture is remix culture. The Web is collaborative, anonymous, tolerant of failure as long as it gets corrected. Zakaria’s copy-and-paste was a fireable offense, but the entire structure of the Web mediasphere was built on just such copy-and-pastes. Someone will call you on it if you don’t give credit, but then you just revise the post and maybe print a correction and no one really cares too much. What matters, instead, is the faith you’ve built up online, which such a sin will damage but hardly kill, especially if you handle it right. The Web, and the generation who grew up with it, think about plagiarism very differently than do the keepers of journalistic ethics. Helene Hegemann, a 17-year-old German writer who was discovered to have lifted numerous passages of her debut novel from other sources without attribution, responded to these revelations not with an apology but with a shrug. Her argument is a neat encapsulation of the ethos of the networked author: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”