WORLD OF LEARNING: ORIGINALITY AND AUTHENTICITY

"Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age" New York Times 8/1/10

The line from Helene Hegemann, teenage author of the famous-for-fifteen-minutes cut-and-paste novel Axolotl Roadkill, sums it up: "There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity."

Of course, Hegemann could be accused of inauthenticity, or at least disingenuousness. She didn't bother to announce her technique until after the fact. But appropriation can be creative, I think, as in sampling and mashups or maybe works like David Shield's Reality Hunger. In a world where copying is so easy and ubiquitous, that's an issue that will take a while to resolve.

Upstream from the college students mentioned in the Times article, though, I see other potential problems. Younger students who lift from the internet not only fail to find their own voice, they don't understand others. Middle school students sometimes don't even bother to read their pasted-in material.