For the second article, I turn to the front page of the New York Times this week, which surfaces the question of students' attitudes toward plagiarism, and the value of originality, within the context of contemporary youth culture. Here's the teaser, and you can find the entire article by clicking here.
BERLIN — It usually takes an author decades to win fawning reviews, march up the best-seller list and become a finalist for a major book prize. Helene Hegemann, just 17, did it with her first book, all in the space of a few weeks, and despite a savaging from critics over plagiarism. [...] Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.
You and I live in a world so accustomed to the dilution of truth with blatant mendacity that the concept of not stealing is nothing more than a petty annoyance I think that corporations lie deliberately in their advertising, and betray the good faith confidence of the public with deliberate obfuscation. Health organizations deny or delay deserved coverage by making the hurdles so high and numerous that honest and deserving claimants simply give up. Automatic telephone answering devices are designed to, and do affect persons getting services or information they ought to have. Each, and scores of other incidents conspire to diminish the individual, originality, and authenticity. Does it all come to this: integrity depends on the individual; corporate or collective integrity is little better than a vanishing illusion.
ReplyDeleteI feel that even though there is a mixture of different ideas and styles that combine together to make new styles, it is still different then plagirizng someones work. Even when a person writes a paper they use others opinions and writings but they only use it to form their own ideas, and then it is a matter of giving them the credit for it. I think that there is a difference between taking ideas and combinding them to make something new then just taking someone elses and claiming them as there own. It is a matter of honesty.
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