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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One of Facebook‘s more popular applications, Pick 5 by Living Social shares much of the appeal of writing poetry in reproducible forms (new or traditional). Pick 5 starts with a sometimes user-generated (and occasionally sponsored)  category or question. To choose your five answers, you start typing in a text box to generate a list of words or phrases with images; if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can upload your own picture. You can post your answers to your profile and compare your answers with your friends’.

The pleasure of Pick 5, then, is in seeing what your friends have selected within this form—how the lists your friends and acquaintances create differ from or resemble your own. This isn’t all that different from a group of friends comparing their sestinas, abecedarians, or Spenserian sonnets. I do not mean to suggest that creating a sestina is as easing as filling in the blanks (though my most successful preteen poem, a line-by-line transformation of The Raven into The Swim Coach, certainly followed a similar procedure), only that at least some of the joys of writing formal verse are similar to the joys provided by applications such as Pick 5.

Still, there is another level to this. Some of the best Pick 5s, like much of the best formal verse, stretch the form. A category may be taken in a snarkily literal way: according to the application, very few of my Facebook friends leave the house without their heads. Sarcastic answers to the favorite parts of the Fourth of July category included variations on things burning down. Imagined dinner party guests have been chosen on the basis of who would have the best arguments rather than who would be most interesting to meet. The rules of the form are broken when someone chooses the same item for all five slots. This latter case is most similar to Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, of which Juliana Spahr noted:

…despite constant allusions to the tradition of the sonnet, Mayer’s are not within the box. One of Mayer’s sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. 

Mayer’s work, however, required much more background reading before it could be written and much more attention to craft to make it work.

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