Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

On Sunday, the New York Times published a story about how the Internet has led to hordes of university students who no longer understand the problem with plagiarism (which is in and of itself not an original idea). You can actually hear the author clutching pearls at the horror of an incident at DePaul University in which

the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

Clearly, if someone under twenty is that shameless about copying, it must be the Internet’s fault because plagiarism never ever ever happened before the World Wide Web. Certainly computers make copying easier but to blame lax attitudes about plagiarism on the Internet seems to require a fundamental failure to understand the nature of the Web.

Hypertext is, by its very nature, citational. The fundamental structure of the Web is citation. Social media generally has citation built into it: if you share a link on Facebook that one of your friends has put up, your post will include a “via” link to the poster you got it from, Tumblr creates “via” chains that often get quite long (though there is some argument about whether one needs to preserve these entirely), and Twitter uses RT (short for retweet) to signify a quotation from another user.

What about community standards? The “RT” retweet was actually originally a user innovation which Twitter picked up, though their recent changes to the retweet system have been controversial. Some of the biggest blog wars I’ve seen have been triggered by plagiarism (not only of exact passages but also of ideas). I’ve seen a number of arguments over attribution on Tumblr, particularly when someone has submitted artwork as their own to a subject-specific Tumblr. Don’t believe me? Make a Twitter or Tumblr (I don’t suggest using your own if you have one already) and start copying people without attribution. See what happens.

I suspect that part of the reason for the false impression that Internet use leads to a condoning of plagiarism has to do with a conflation of legal copyright with ethical authorship rights. Digital native and immigrant generations make a distinction between the two: they might be illegally downloading a song on Limewire while emailing a blog owner demanding that a copied post be taken down. One of the main alternatives to copyright in its restrictive form, the Creative Commons License, has as one of its options, allowing free use so long as credit is given; this is one of the limits I have placed on my blog content and on my Flickr images, for instance.

The Internet, rather than being blamed for plagiarism, should be used to explain the importance of citation. Talk to students about what happens in online communities when someone copies without credit. Discuss why it’s wrong. Note the differences between an academic paper and blog posts on the one hand and, on the other, genres in which remix and cut-and-paste are (arguably) more acceptable.

As for the students who copy from Wikipedia, the site is so commonly consulted that people need to be taught how to use it appropriately in research (i.e. if it’s a good article, use its references—appropriately cited, of course).

There are always have been and always will be individuals who try to cheat for whatever reason. Blaming the Internet for the current wave of plagiarists, however, is fundamentally wrongheaded.

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Recently, the wonderful Jen Daisybee of Suicidal No More honored me with the Blog with Substance Award. I am, in turn, to describe the philosophy, motivation, and experience behind my blog in five words and then pass the award on to ten other blogs.

First, the five words:

stop one heart from breaking

It is a truncated version of an Emily Dickinson quote which I probably use way too often, but it’s also what lies behind all my writing, not just blogging.

Now on to the blogs, which appear in no particular order (and with the caveat that there are many more I could have named):

• Peony Moon
• cripchick’s blog
• this ain’t livin’
• three rivers fog
• Michelle Naka Pierce
• Stoney Moss
• Everything Distils into Reading
• firmly rooted
• The Buffaloe Pen
• random babble…

I was also selected as one of the finalists in the BlogHer Voices of the Year Competition. Which category? Geeky/Nerdy, of course.

Lady GaGa is an artist of the pop-absurd. In other words, she works with and creates absurdity designed to be consumed by a mass audience. Unlike the works of a more avant-garde artist of the absurd, hers do not demand a new way of understanding but, rather, may be interpreted by the tools the audience already possesses. One of the blatant absurdities of Telephone is that, as Dodai at Jezebel complains:

The video doesn’t go with the song. The song is about being getting phonecalls when you’re out clubbing and not wanting to have a conversation on the dancefloor. Where does a high-fashion women’s prison come in?

To me, the absurdity of that mismatch is part of the point: incredible frivolity combines with serious issues. People go to clubs and complain about reception while prisoners cannot get a proper phone connection and are strip-searched for no other reason than the guards’ prurient interests all the time. Outside of a Lady GaGa video, however, it usually isn’t the same people who have a dance party and are abused in prison (at least not simultaneously) nor do the dance parties which occur at the same time as mass murder usually happen at the crime scene.

By collapsing the distance between these events, Telephone points to the absurdity of a world in which some party while others suffer and particularly the absurdity that people dance though they are aware that other people are suffering, an awareness intensified by the very medium for which Telephone was created. Sady at Feministe has pointed out that the video has to have been developed with Internet distribution in mind:

You seriously cannot show this video on television! It was not designed to be shown on television, ever! It is ten minutes long, and it has more dialogue than music, and it has the “fuck” word and naked breasts and vaginas and girl-on-girl action and basically everybody gets murdered. At no point did anyone making this video think, “I’m still pretty sure we could get this on television, though.” No. It was made to be on the Internet. And you can tell because this affects the form itself, like the actual decisions of how to shoot and edit the damn thing. You can tell this video was meant to be turned into nine million animated GIFs, for example, because there are several parts of it that are shot to look like animated GIFs.

So Telephone points to the absurdities of postmodern life, but does it cross into social commentary? Because of the limits of the pop-absurd, the answer to this question depends on the audience: what awareness they bring of certain issues to the video to begin with and how they feel about Lady GaGa (and possibly pop music in general). At the diner, when GaGa and crew started dancing around in American flag apparel, I couldn’t help but think of the “collateral damage” of the War on Terror. GaGa and Beyoncé poison a whole diner full of people (and a dog, which as Harq at Only Words to Play With points out, has the potential to be particularly shocking) in order to kill Beyoncé’s asshole boyfriend. But you’re not going to get that connection unless you were already horrified by the term “collateral damage”, and the deaths are so aestheticized and the poison presented in such an ironic product-placement style, that it is hard to be upset by the killings (which is why the video gets away with showing the dead dog).

Going back to the prison, one could interpret the stripping of Lady GaGa by the prison guards as emblematic of how invasive cissexism can be. Her clothes are torn off, apparently in order to check her parts, since one of the guards comments “I told you she didn’t have a dick.” But once again, unless you are already aware of the issue, nothing demands that you read the scene as social commentary. For the mass audience, it comes across as nothing more than Lady GaGa’s way of finally putting to rest rumors about her being intersex (and thus upholds the commonly held and offensive belief that intersex is something bad to be because why would she need to do a full reveal to prove otherwise unless it were?).

In both cases, the need to keep absurdity “pop” means that the scenes must be kept palatable. Violence must be presented in a way that the audience knows how to consume, a way that doesn’t get stuck in the throat; the references to Tarantino, particularly the Pussy Wagon, are there to help you along in case you forget how. The prisoners are presented in a pornified way because audiences know how to consume those images—as something enjoyable or as something ironic and problematic (depending on your stance and awareness).

Making the absurd palatable to a broad audience means straddling the line between commentary and frivolity. A similar duality can be found in the use of product placement. To quote Only Words to Play With:

The video is peppered with both real (e.g. Miracle Whip, Wonder Bread, Polaroid, Chanel, Diet Coke, Virgin, Plenty of Fish) and fake products (e.g. Poison TV, Double-Breasted Drive-Thru, CookNKill Recipes).  This combination of real and fake allows the video to both enjoy the benefits of product placement, and parody the enterprise in the same swoop.  Once again, we’re dealing, I think, with a carnivalesque aesthetic, or a type of conceptualist art that parodies by displaying too loudly or too blatantly that which is being mocked.  The comfortably familiar form is being used to market poison, and at the same time its used to promote Polaroid.  Gaga’s having her cake and eating it too.

The practice of advertising by mocking advertising techniques is, however, well-established. Moreover, GaGa keeps the fake and real products clearly separate: the mass audience has the competence to read “poison” as something which is not being seriously advertised, since one cannot advocate murder. The Diet Coke cans in GaGa’s hair, on the other hand, represent an odd use of the product but in no way tell viewers not to consider the endorsement valid. Now, if those cans had been used to make a murder weapon, that would have crossed the line where GaGa lives.

Pop-absurdity by definition dwells on that edge, creating the excitement of transgression without actually challenging the beliefs of any but the most conservative members of the mass audience.

cross-posted at BlogHer

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You probably know by now that GeoCities has officially disappeared from the web, and while this has led to a lot of well-deserved jokes about the death of blinking text, obnoxious graphics, and other aspects of awful webdesign, it’s worth remembering that GeoCities also represented an important stage in the development of the web and how we participate in it. I don’t think I’m the only person who built their first website (or, as we called it back in the mid-90s, homepage) there and eventually moved to their own domain. Now, I will admit to having used a few obnoxious bouncing graphics when I started out, but it was by playing with webdesign on GeoCities that I learned just how distracting those could be (as well as which colors of text and background don’t work so well together). It was also how I learned HTML. GeoCities also helped me learn about the importance of interactivity. (Remember guestbooks?)

GeoCities also had, in nascent form, some of what we now consider aspects of Web 2.0. The homepages were organized into theme-based communities. (I was in SoHo with the other artists, SoHo/Cafe to be specific.) Through neighborhood-based directories and chats, you could connect with your “neighbors”. This never really developed into the sort of connectivity you can see in later community sites such as Livejournal, and in some ways GeoCities actually went backwards after Yahoo! bought it (at least, interest-based communities seemed to be de-emphasized).

RIP GeoCities!!!!!!

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