What’s changed in plagiarism?

Kids don’t even know they’re doing it anymore.

Check out this NY Times article featuring the common practices of college students who don’t get it when they’re “caught” because of the ways the digital age is redefining authorship and copyright.

This may or may not be surprising news.  It’s something along the lines of outrageous for the average college student to even consider not cheating.

But here’s something else interesting.  Anthropologist Susan D. Blum from Notre Dame is exploring what she’s calling a shift in the way we view authorship and originality altogether, and even personhood.  The Enlightenment-informed hyper-individualism with which we’re all so familiar (and which spurred the development of such Western standards as copyright law) may be losing strength.  The Times quotes Blum as saying:

If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade. ¹

What do you think?  Is originality in decline, is plain old cheating getting worse, or is a new “mash-up” normal emerging in which borrowing ideas and words from others is more acceptable?  Whether all three of those questions are true or false may be less important than how we talk with kids about the issue.  Ask a few teenagers what they think this week, and let us know what they say!

1. Trip Gabriel, “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age” (NY Times online, August 1, 2010). [↩]

©2010 Fuller Youth Institute