Non fiction

Fuck it, copy and paste

Struggling with writing, I realized that it became even more difficult the more I read other people's work. Each text somehow opened a new door in my head with many thoughts behind it, but every attempt to develop one of these thoughts further failed at some point because either the content or the form or style of it was too similar to something I had just read.

This experience has happened to me many times before, especially when researching secondary literature for an essay or a paper. Reading all these more or less well verbalized ideas, I would think that everything has been said already and above all in much better way than I could possibly phrase it. Still you have to come up with your own words, your own ideas and if, despite everything, you do have to take anything from another text, you are of course supposed to mark it in the most clearest way. But what if we reach the day on which everything we want to say is there in front of us?

With the title “Fuck it, copy and paste” I've tried to refer to issues of intellectual property and plagiarism at university. Without a doubt, intellectual property is a good which has to be protected as strictly as any other physical good. But, like Gunther Kress (2010) in his book Multimodality, I think that changes in our (technical) environment should also somehow result in new concepts of authorship. He states that “the accusation of plagiarism is itself now becoming an anachronistic term, harking back to a different social, semiotic and legal environment” (p. 21). Technical innovations allow us to share and distribute texts, music, pictures as never before and therefore could give way to concepts like collaborative authorship for instance. I don’t believe that ‘copy and paste’ is the new way of working, but neither do I believe that mere laziness is a satisfactory explanation for the increase in plagiarism or the willingness to commit plagiarism.

Another (minor) aspect of the text is the importance of counting and numbers in our world. Basically everything in our environment seems to be numbered, and put in a time frame. I tried to pick up this topic because it struck me that the duration of studying is so much more fixed in the UK. The majority gets their degree within 3 years without any delay. In Germany, however, there is a vivid discussion at the moment about the idea of ‘Regelstudienzeit’ (which is the certain number of semesters needed to complete a course). The background of this discussion are findings that only a minority of the students manage to stick to this number of semesters which then may have effects on the funding of their studies as well. Anyway, the question is whether it is worthwhile to finish one’s studies as fast as possible or whether an extended period of learning (not only academic learning, but also social learning) wouldn’t be more profitable in the end.  Students are put under intense pressure, first through society which expects students to fulfill the impossible (work hard, play hard) and second through themselves. Without even noticing students become their own ‘Panopticon’ (cf. Michel Foucault) expecting themselves to enjoy everything they do and to ‘make the most of it’ in every sense. Thus, not only university tasks but even pleasure and leisure can become stressful tasks and obligations.

Annkatrin Blessing

© 2014