Plagiarism, laziness, and the wisdom of keith richards

As long as you turn the set on and put your finger in the air, if there's any songs out there, they'll come through you. It's very easy to get hung up on just the simple mechanics and craft of songwriting rather than the more important thing that real master musicians like the wherling dervishes can tell us about: just letting it go through you and come out the other side. -- Keith Richards, 1983

Sometimes you have to wonder what year the New York Times thinks it is. About seven years after it became a widespread (and widely-reported) probem,  Trip Gabriel had a piece this weekend reporting that the digital age is blurring the lines of what constitutes plagiarism for university students. Aside from having nothing remotely new, the piece is an absolute mess, quoting academics tossing out one half-baked theory after another, without even attempting to do some basic analysis of whether any of it makes the slightest sense.

Stop if you've heard this before: the cut 'n paste features of the internet haven't just made it easier for lazy students to cheat. No, the rip/mix/burn online culture has actually changed our definition of the self.

 Lord, are we still talking this way? Apparently so:

A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language....

 In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

Look, we may be on the road to some po-mo world where nobody ever says anything new, but the very fact that we find these cases worisome proves that we haven't quite left modernity behind.

We should start by reminding ourselves that plagiarism is foremost a moral question. Sometimes it is illegal (such as when someone makes use of copyrighted material), but the essence of plagiarism is that it is one of a clutch of ethical offences that include fabricating memoirs or news reports, fraud, lying, hypocrisy, and forgery. What unites these is that they all involve some form of misrepresentation.

In many ways, plagiarism is just the flip side of forgery: The forger passes off his own work as that of someone else, while plagiarists pass off the work of others as their own. Plagiarism is an offence that involves the misrepresentation of the self. The reason why we get hung up about these things is because we hold fast to a number of moral ideals about the self. We give these ideals names like uniqueness, integrity and originality, but the motivating principle is what we can call the ethic of authenticity.

As an ethic, it is an injunction to be true to oneself, to place the cultivation of your real self at the forefront of your concern. Our culture remains strongly committed to the ethic of authenticity. Indeed, the reason plagiarism is on the rise is not because we care less about the morality of misrepresentation but -- paradoxically -- because we care about it too deeply.

Because of our commitment to authenticity, we tend to look down on ideas that are borrowed or derivative. We fight over credit for things, partly because there are potential financial or status rewards, but also because we believe there is something profoundly unjust about people receiving credit for books they didn't write or inventions they didn't invent.

But this actually gives us a strong incentive to lie about where we got our ideas. When her plagiarism scandal first hit, Harvard girl wonder Kaavya Viswanathan claimed that she had simply internalized themes and passages from her favourite books. This is the plagiarist's usual gambit, and it is parodied in the  film The Squid and the Whale. At the school talent show, Walt announces that he is a about to sing a song he wrote, and proceeds to play a song from Pink Floyd's The Wall. When he's caught, Walt denies that he has done anything wrong. He claims that because he believed that it was the sort of song he could have written, the fact that he didn't was immaterial.

Hilarious, yes, but not far from the truth. Every writer runs into situations where he reads something that seems so obvious, that is so perfectly phrased, that he feels that he would have put it exactly that way, if only he'd thought of it. On these occasions, plagiarism doesn't feel like stealing so much as the appropriation of part of one's true self.

But even this is probably overthinking the problem a bit too much. It's only at the end of Gabriel's piece does a sane voice enter the scene, in the form of Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office at UC Davis. Most of the cases of plagiarism, he says, did not come from students who were in the thrall of some metaphysical theory of postmodern identity. Instead, they were simply  “unwilling to engage the writing process,” i.e. they were lazy.

Or as Keef might say, it's easier just to let the ideas flow through you and out the other side. 

Occam's razor remains a very useful tool, even for reporters.

More from Rob Horning.

authenticity, influence, and innovation

The website "I write like" has been making the rounds (apparently Kim Kardashian writes like James Joyce),  even though the site's founder says there's nothing remotely scientific about it and that he was just goofing around. (For those who missed it: you paste a short writing sample in a box and click the "analyze" button. The site examines word choice and writing style and tells you what famous author the writing most resembles.)

Toronto Star writer Katie Daubs had some fun with the site last weekend, plugging in text from Dalton McGuinty, Yann Martel, and yours truly (apparently my blogging style is closest to that of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk). But behind the fun is the question of influence, which for many writers is a matter of utmost seriousness. I spent most of my twenties trying to write like David Foster Wallace and Martin Amis, and maybe Palahniuk is their bastard child. I like to think that I've evolved my own characteristic writing style, one that is authentically mine. What does it matter if I haven't?

Harold Bloom coined the term "the anxiety of influence" to refer to the sense that every artist or writer has at some point, that everything has been said, that nothing they do is original. The desire to fight free of one's influences and say something completely new is one of the driving forces of artistic creation. The downside to this, though, is that it tends to overstate the role of originality in all spheres. The fact is, even as we fetishize the authentic, the truth is that most innovations are incremental advances or simple reworkings of ideas that have been around for ages.

Keith Richards famously brushed off accusations of plagiarism by saying that he just grabs riff out of the air as they go by; Noel Gallagher of Oasis once said that when he's stuck for a song idea, he just starts playing "Octopus's Garden" until an idea comes to him. On that note, here's another passage from my chat with Matt Ridley that got cut from the print version:

CB: You have this phrase you use: innovation happens when “ideas have sex.” In Canada and elsewhere, a big locus of debate for both government and business is over “innovation”: what it is, how to invest in it and foster it. But you seem to be arguing that there is nothing rare or mysterious about it. Given a critical mass of humans and open markets, innovation happens as almost a natural process.  

MR: I do, and there are a number of things going on here. The first is that we have a tendency to overestimate the grand leaps in innovation at the expense of the small steps. We do that partly because the patent system rewards us for doing that, and militates against recognizing incremental steps. And second, there is the quest for fame and glory. If you go back to any great discovery – DNA, the steam engine – you find people are pissed off because they didn’t get the credit. And you discover that the story was far more about perspiration than inspiration. To that extent, the innovation we need to be looking at is often low-tech, often small steps, often happening in small firms not ivory towers, and is often process rather than product, often boring. For example, cross docking for suppliers to Walmart is not like the laser, but might have done more for mankind.

But to your general point, I want to point to the inexorable nature of economic growth. Whatever is happening, the wars and the depressions and the dictators that are throwing it off course, whatever the picture you look at, the more global the number, the smoother the line. And whatever is going on, it is bottom up or crowd-sourced, not ordained from above, and it does look like the inevitable product of people being in the situation where they exchange is that you will get these inching forwards of technologies and ideas.

Death of the Author 2.0

The principal consequence of what I (and many others) have called "Culture 2.0" is that it made the old sharp distinctions between producers and consumers of culture more or less obsolete. The fight over the fundamental question -- who does the culture belong too, anyway? -- is what has motivated what has broadly been called the "copyright wars," but which we would rightly have called "the culture wars", if that excellent term hadn't been used to describe a much stupider conflict.

The fight has taken place on many levels, from the strictly legal to the moral to the outright metaphysical. And while I've been fairly sympathetic over the years to the copyleft/creative commons side of the argument, many of its more strident advocates have gone too far, and committed serious category mistakes.

First, they have gone too far by often arguing that copyright law is itself illegitimate. But as Lawrence Lessig liked to remind people, the whole creative commons idea was underwritten by strong copyright protections for creators (i.e. you can only permit the expansive use of something you already own). Second, the blurring of the old distinctions has been used to justify a great deal of straight cultural theft, on the grounds that "no one ever really creates anything anyway". Call it Death of the Author 2.0.

In an essay on the Barnes and Noble website, Andrew Keen (author of a hilariously written corrective to the prevailing net populism, The Cult of the Amateur) takes on a pair of  plagiarists, one of whom -- in classic Squid and the Whale style -- justifies her theft on the grounds that it's all about authenticity. The culprit this time is Helene Hegemann, who responded by saying: "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,"

This is bullshit on stilts, as philosophers used to say. Keen takes the reasoning apart, noting that the sort of "authenticity" these authors champion has the effect of driving  "us deeper into ourselves, thereby isolating us from one another. Rather than a radical subversion of tradition, the doubt they champion is not a hunger for reality, but a hunger for their own reflection in every window looking out upon the world."