Plagiarism is Not the Cat's Meow

I've been running through a list of my favorite authors all night trying to pick the perfect sounding name for my new kitten. One of my favorite professors at Winthrop has a cat named Oscar (after Oscar Wilde) and a dog, named Dora (after Eudora Welty), and I thought it was a clever way to pick names. As I read over some of the lectures on the class blog this week the most recent one, regarding authorship in the digital age, I began to consider the implications of publishing in the digital age and its effect on authors. Would James Joyce, Isabel Allende, and Flannery O'Connor still be my favorites if I read their texts on a screen under a pseudonym? Would I still consider them credible if I didn't consume their printed texts?

McLuhan summarizes the impact of printed text on authorship in "The Message is the Massage" when he says: "The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property" (McLuhan 122). Throughout the history of printed text, we as readers have given credence to these authors' intellectual effort and acknowledged their ownership of these words through warnings against plagiarism and repeatedly re-printing and selling these texts with their names on the spine.

However, all of this raises questions, in my mind, for coming-to-fame authors in the digital age: will they have the same ownership over their words as their predecessors? Will the cyber sphere create a space void of authorship? Will readers be able to give credence to these digital texts if they're not protected as private property?

In an article by Trip Gabriel in the New York Times, titled "Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age,"  one of the biggest problems for writers in the digital age comes to light. Students are becoming unable to grasp the concept that literature, articles, and essays on the internet belong to the writers who penned them. The article states that this phenomenon is due to the digital era, saying, "It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information..." (Gabriel).

Obviously, it's not just novels and fiction that are under attack. PDF's of textbooks, digital newspaper articles, Wikipedia pages, and Sparknotes entries are all eligible for pick-and-choose plagiarism so prevalent today. In addition to the students lack of respect for these texts, faculty and academic institutions insisting that Wikipedia and other online articles (besides those from online academic databases) are not credible sources is constructing the framework that just because a text is online it doesn't deserve the same respect we pay to printed authors.

I am all for being able to read "Dubliners," "The House of the Spirits," and "Wise Blood" on my Nook, but it isn't without concern for the perceived decrease of respect for authors in a cyber-centric world.

Works Cited:

Gabriel, Trip. "Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in Digital Age." The New York Times. N.p., 1

     Aug. 2010. Web. 9 Sept. 2014. 

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. San Francisco, CA: HardWired, 1996. Print.