All technological change is generational change. The transitional generations – the in-betweeners with five toes in the old world, five in the new – never see things clearly. You couldn’t even say they see through a glass darkly; it’s a bright mirror they’re looking into. They assume that what’s to come will be a perfect mashup of what they think was good about the old and what they think is good about the new. But that’s not how it works. Technological change, and the economic change it produces, is not a moral force; it’s simply an implacable force. “We’re making the technologies,” says John Brockman. “Then the technologies make us.”
Patrick Ross, of the Center for the Study of Digital Property, shares a tale from the home front:
A few months ago my 11-year-old daughter was researching a paper on Jesse Owens for social studies. She didn’t go to the library, pull down reference books and fill up 3×5 index cards. She went onto Google. She found plenty of materials. But when I asked to read her completed paper, it was nothing but a cut-and-paste job from various web sites on Owens; she even included, quite randomly, part of a press release about some recent celebration in his honor.
My daughter’s work ethic may not always be what I’d like it to be, but she’s bright and can write more than sufficiently for a 5th grade social studies class. Yet she seemed flat-out baffled when I explained to her that the paper wasn’t acceptable. “Is the information wrong?” she asked. “Did I leave something out?” No to both. But she hadn’t written her own paper, and more importantly, she hadn’t learned anything, as was clear when I began to quiz her about the content in her own “paper.” Hard to transfer knowledge in the two seconds it takes to select and move.
Click click. Cut and paste.
“The ultimate search engine,” says Larry Page, “would understand everything in the world.” Just like Patrick Ross’s daughter understands Jesse Owens.
Ross offers a second tale:
A few weeks ago, I was doing some intellectual property research and was reading materials on a WIPO-affiliated web site. A Google search on a narrow topic I wanted more information on suggested a Wikipedia entry as my first choice … so I pulled up the link. Lo and behold, the exact text I had just read on the WIPO site was in the Wikipedia entry, but there was no indication it came from WIPO.
Click click. Cut and paste.
“We’re already taking back the Internet,” says Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia. “With your help, we can take back the world.”
From whom, Jimmy? From whom?
Ross points to a BBC article on the way “many of the new generation of students raised on the internet see nothing wrong with copying other people’s work.” “I just couldn’t say it better myself,” they’ll explain, so why not cut and paste? I mean, why give us the Internet if you don’t want us to use it?
The issue isn’t plagiarism. The issue is the meaning of “understanding” and how it’s changing.
Here’s Mark Cuban, another Internet billionaire: “In the past, you had to memorize knowledge because there was a cost to finding it. Now, what can’t you find in 30 seconds or less? We live an open-book-test life that requires a completely different skill set.”
Click click. Cut and paste.
A completely different skill set.
Andrew Keen is aghast: “We have created technology that is encouraging a culture of intellectual kleptocracy and all anyone wants to talk about is rights.”
But the road ahead is paved with the yellow bricks of good intentions, Andrew. It must be leading to a happy place. And, besides, we’re the in-betweeners. We’ll all be comfortably dead by the time our grandchildren pass through the gates of Oz.
This reminds me of an old saying:
“The invention of rifles, was the death of courage.”
And when the mice invaded our desktops, I guess they brought along a new disease:
If it takes more than three clicks (or if you have to type a lot), there is probably another way to do it.
Craig
SING!
[Oh my god, I CUT-AND-PASTED THAT! From GOOOOGLE!!!]
Look, students have been copying (sometimes clumsily) for papers since time immemorial. This sort of singing the “Kids!” song is just, err, cut-and-paste.
“The Guardian of the Gates found a pair [of emerald-tinted spectacles] that would just fit Dorothy and put them over her eyes. There were two golden bands fastened to them that passed around the back of her head, where they were locked together by a little key that was at the end of a chain the Guardian of the Gates wore around his neck. When they were on, Dorothy could not take them off had she wished, but of course she did not wish to be blinded by the glare of the Emerald City, so she said nothing.” ~The Wonderful World of Oz by L. Frank Baum
re Mark Cuban’s comment: I think he is failing to understand the role played by memorization in the human thought process. See my post Thinking and Memorizing.
Seth, As I wrote, the issue isn’t plagiarism. If you weren’t so eager to find some glib retort through a reflexive Google search, maybe you’d be able to read more carefully and respond more thoughtfully. Nick
Lo que se necesita es que los profesores re-aprendan a enseñar (osea a garantizar el aprendizaje) ¡Hay que contar con que Google está ahí y toda la Web! (¿Alguien podría seguir funcionando sin ella a estas alturas?) Una tarea (homework) que se puede resolver en los 30 seg de Google más un cut and paste ciertamente ya no es una tarea…
“The gates of Oz” contain a stable system. The Emerald City is self-sustaining, internally consistent, and complete from an evolutionary standpoint. It can represent the utopia we seek as a society, or the nirvana we aspire to as individuals. But deep inside, we all know the story doesn’t end there.
After the laws of our universe became stable, our galaxy could evolve by building on the foundation of those laws. Solar systems could form within relatively stable galaxies. Evolution on an individual planet could begin after its solar system became reliable. At least one of these planetary systems had diversity, interaction and useful reduction sufficient to produce the molecular information storage that we know as DNA. DNA evolution completed its “yellow brick” journey, allowing brains to evolve. After millions of years of brain evolution, that level is complete. We are currently building on top of that foundation, and we have been for thousands of years. As our social reliance on each other increases, we become one organism. The end of our current level of social evolution is that all humanity (with the exception of a few Luddites) becomes one mind.
Just as each level of evolution incorporates the completed levels it is built upon as nodes in the whole, each of us are neurons inside the nearly completed global brain. We’ve been seeking this utopia for a long time, but evolution will not stop when we finally get the communication resources to achieve it. Only this level will be stable. The level that is built on top of our consummated collective intelligence will be just as exciting as this one, even if it remains unfathomable for now.
Please. There is nothing about digital culture which praises plagiarism. The best written blogs do engage in dialogue by quoting others, but at the same time we praise them for their original contribution. Despite Wikipedia, the author is still alive and kicking–just look at the ego-filled talk pages. The aesthetic beauty of Open Source software is not just in the copying, but in the original contribution made by each modifier. The cut in paste culture is more appropriately the “remix” culture, because it praises highly the derivative work. One of the hallmarks of the copyfight itself is its emphasis on cultures essential connection to derivation.
more…
Actually, I didn’t say “plagiarism” (yes, I saw “The issue isn’t plagiarism. The issue is the meaning of “understanding” and how it’s changing.) . I said “copying”, which also encompasses the mechanical transfer of passages in books to student papers, except in the olden days it was done by some sort of impact technology. I don’t see where there was ever any more transfer of knowledge in the older retyping compared to the newer clip job.
In fact, I’d argue the easy access is a slight positive. At least the time saved typing *could* be used for thought – even if it usually isn’t.
I repeat, this is a classic “Kids today!” complaint. Look at the BBC article:
“In her presentation for the conference, she says students do not necessarily see anything wrong with copying other people’s work.” …
“They are post-modern, eclectic, Google-generationists, Wikipediasts, who don’t necessarily recognise the concepts of authorships/ownerships.”
Now, if anything deserves puncturing here, it’s a phrase like “post-modern, eclectic, Google-generationists, Wikipediasts …”. What a word-salad, spun out of stating the obvious, that (some) students copy from others without shame! They always have, they always will, Google and Wikipedia aren’t *changing* anything except the mechanics.
Seth,
The entire Industrial Revolution was just a matter of changing “the mechanics.” Sometimes changing the mechanics is trivial. Sometimes it’s monumental.
Zephram understands this, in his twisted, post-human way.
Nick
If I am the global brain, and the global brain created the article, how could that be plagiarism? Is the strongest node going to claim that it isn’t affected by the rest?
Seth,
The time my daughter saved was not used for thinking; it was consumed by my quizzing her, and then she spent far more time doing her paper over again.
When those of us Nick calls the in-betweeners were copying, we at least had to read the encyclopedia, and hand-write or retype passages. Still not as good as writing yourself, but at least in the process of re-writing or typing we had to actually read what we were writing or typing and maybe absorb something. My daughter absorbed nothing, of course. Maybe if you had witnessed this as a parent you would have just sung gaily and moved on, but that was not my reaction.
Note the other example Nick cited, where I found WIPO text in Wikipedia. That could have been footnoted, but it was just put in there without attribution. It demonstrates a lack of appreciation for authorship, as Nick and the UK professor note.
nick,
the real problem (forest-trees) is not one of plagiarism, but of the insipid educational system that doesn’t ask more of students, even young ones, than to reguritate some facts and figures.
What schools should do is encourage students to develop their own analysis of a topic on which to write. I find if kids have to paste-and-copy in order to write a report, than the assignment wasn’t that challenging to begin with.
Moreover, most of these reports are forgotten and discarded the minute they are graded and handed back to the students.
Patrick, I said (emphasis added): “At least the time saved typing *could* be used for thought – even if it usually isn’t“.
Regarding – ” … at least in the process of re-writing or typing we had to actually read …” – does the argument really rest on this? The good old days of mindless rescribing, compared to the horrors, the hell-in-a-handbasket, of copy buffers? Doesn’t this sound exactly like the stereotypical fuddy-duddy trying to justify how his or her era was so much better? (“*Cough, *wheeze*, in my day, even if we copied the passages straight out, by golly, we copied them with our own bony fingers, and even if we didn’t understand a word, why, *ack*, there was a person touch in that non-understanding that this newfangled copying by Googypedilia doesn’t have, dagnabbit!”)
And Wikipedia has a lot of people who have zero conception of academic citation, granted. This hardly means kids today are worse overall (it means Wikipedia has too many kiddies, but we knew that already).
I actually encouraged my (ten-year-old) son to google for information for a homework task; he didn’t actually cut and paste what he found, but I was dismayed by his inability to tell the difference between ‘enough information’ (three different Web pages, with lots of words on them) and ‘enough information’ (to give a useful account of the subject).
Certainly there have always been kids who cared more about getting the Right Answer than about actually understanding it,
but I’d never have put my son in that category (and not only because he’s my son – he’s the kind of kid who reels off Interesting Facts and has an opinion about everything). I think this idea of knowledge as something available off-the-shelf, something pre-understood, has gained in prominence massively thanks to the Web – or, at least, one very influential model of the Web.
From the perspective of another in-betweener, it’s not necessarily “what’s the matter with kids today?” it’s what’s the matter with the those darned parents and that danged education system! I can’t begin to tell you how many parents I’ve met who think it’s just *so* cute that their precious little one can figure out the confounded machine that consumer culture told them they needed(like the iPod Nano the 5 year old is sporting and TiVo the 7 year old demanded last Christmas.) They look at cut-and-paste as cleaver and, actually, *smart* because *they* can’t figure out how to manipulate the mouse properly, let alone construct the correct boolean search to get the information they might be looking for.
Essentially, some adults see computers–and alot of new technology–as mystifying and their average-intelligence kids who use them as junior geniuses. So, they’re going to think that however their junior genius gets his/her homework done, it must be much better than any method they used to do their homework back in the Stone Age.
I wonder, though, are we actually raising a generation of future parents that will be even more self-obsessed and superficial than the Boomers?
Further, No Child Left Behind initiatives are doing nothing to encourage independent thinking, and doing everything to encourage kids to conform to the Least Common Denominator. Why think, do research, and be smarter than your peers when all that’s going to do is throw off the bell-curve? And do you have the time to do research and learn when rote memorization is what one needs to Pass the Test.
The kind of mind that is nurtured in the cut-and-paste generation will fit fine in a world where following, rather than thinking, is a most desirable trait. We’re all consumers, not thinkers, after all, aren’t we??
I have to agree with others that the problem isn’t “kids today”. Plagiarists have been a part of our history since the dawn of written language. While some might be lured to plagiarism because of how easy it is to do with computers, odds are, most of today’s plagiarists would have been plagiarists in the pen and paper age as well.
Yes, many don’t understand the idea of authorship but that’s been another problem throughout the history of the written word. Good parents teach their children these ideas and, sadly, not everybody gets such notions instilled in them as they grow up. Once again, that’s pretty typical.
However, I do have to agree that the technological advances greatly increase the risk that these same people can do. Where once a plagiarist could, at best, only copy a few papers, now one can copy tomes of text with the click of a mouse.
Webmasters are battling this as their content is being stolen for a variety of reasons, resulting, in some cases, in several near instant perfect copies of their work under other’s names. This has nothing to do with remix culture, OSS or any of the other copyleft ideals that still value authorship. This is an ongoing problem fought on a whole new front.
The technology may be the only thing that’s changed, but the impact has been huge and will continue to be.
How it will change things remains to be seen.
Schooling in the United States fails because it still aims at providing a “well-rounded education.” Memorizing general knowledge about a wide variety of subjects is as useless today as math without a calculator was in the nineties. Neither provides anything that can be used in the real world. Just as a calculator came to be considered a reliable extension of our brains, so to must the Internet in today’s schools if we hope to be able to compete with the rest of the world.
“We’re making the technologies,” says John Brockman. “Then the technologies make us.”
This is just a para-phrasing of what the author, Thoreau once said, we don’t ride on the railway, the railway rides on us. The fact is, we have been taking about the impacts of technology on how we think and work, for maybe two centuries. But we still do nothing about it.
The simple truth is, the university education rewards the young student for speed. I came into architectural design education from an artistic background. Apparently, if you come with artistic, visual abilities, you might some day make a good architect.
But, I always compare it to Bjorn Borg, the tennis player, who couldn’t hit the tennis ball for his first couple of matches at Wimbledon. He would get progressively better as the tournament progressed. He a natural clay court player. Just like I was a natural user of oil paints on the canvas. I found myself in an architectural degree course, which needed me to re-adjust my vision and my eyesight, to draw narrow, crisp, straight lines, which represented the reality of the built environment.
Of course, certain students were very efficient, and though not too creative, could easily ‘copy’ other architect’s designs and get good marks for their projects. Before I was even allowed to get a feel for the grass court, being a natural clay court player – I was dubbed a loser in the educational system. This happened to loads of my student friends who had also been drafted from music, art, sculpture and other artistic backgrounds.
The great Dutch Architect, Herman Hertzberger spoke about the problem of architectural students in university and work today. They are ‘so efficient’ he said, using Photoshop and other applications. Herman said, the young architectural minds, find form first and then search for meaning. Herman said, he tries desperately, to find meaning and then search for form. Herman also admitted, he was very alone in this today. The system rewards the efficient copy and paste crews. I wrote about Herman’s lecture here:
http://www.archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3933&
Brian O’Hanlon.
Nick, I think you are right on here. Mark Cuban is suffering from bad epistemology, as are traditional schools (Montessori schools don’t make this mistake). The world is not a pile of atomic facts. Everything is connected in countless ways, and the most interesting and useful ways can only be grasped by a hard-working human mind. Finding a text is only the first, most insignificant step towards finding out what it means. Here’s a challenge for the “what can’t you find?” crowd: find the lessons (not just the text) of Homer in 30 seconds using you favorite browser.