Digital Plagiarism

Copy-and-paste literacies

Digital Collage? Or Plagiarism?

Copy-and-Paste Literacies

New Literacies: A Phenomenon Bridging Multiple Contexts

“New media/digital literacies” (hereinafter referred to as “new literacies”) are valuable in the emerging information ecosystem. One of the new literacies that has become increasingly prevalent due to the continued penetration of the Internet is the increased opportunity for developing “Copy-and-Paste Literacies.” More specifically, copy-and-paste literacies are new literacies that could emerge through the act of copying digital content and pasting it into other contexts. Copy-and-paste literacies have the potential to provide youth with valuable skills and understandings in not only their personal and social spheres but also in formal academic education. Copy-and-paste literacies may prove useful in programming computers, remixing digital media, creating multimedia wikis and collaborating across online spaces, among other ever-emerging possibilities.

However, copy-and-paste practices are not uniformly seen as beneficial. Copying-and- pasting is normally in opposition to the rules, codes of conduct and ethos of formal academic educational settings. And in a legal context, copy-and-paste practices violate traditional copyright law — both formal regulatory frameworks that were enacted to circumscribe it as well as the emerging case law. This session investigates the phenomenon of copy-and-paste literacy and its position within new literacy debates.

The Paradoxical Influence of Technology on Literacy

The invention of the Gutenberg press opened up the potential for a future development that Walter Benjamin would term “mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin, 1968). Essentially, Gutenberg’s printing press technology allowed the mass-production of copied text. This resulted in the positive, widespread, effect of disseminating textual material at a cheap price across the globe. As a result, as reproduction costs continued to decrease and channels of distribution continued to become more fluid, literacy eventually flourished among the masses, especially in the developed world.

In the Internet age, Benjamin’s ideas concerning mechanical reproduction have appeared to grow exponentially. The development of a global, online digital network has fostered an ability to allow anyone with an Internet connection to reproduce digital content of many types virtually instantaneously. It has also given people the ability to share this content with a global audience. As a result, previous communications constraints of geography and time have been radically conflated.

As online digital networks and the digital reproduction of content become more pervasive, a counter argument in some literacy circles has begun to emerge. Is the ability to mass-produce content at such an incredibly low entry point, literally at the click of a mouse, condemning digital natives to a life of lower literacy levels than their analog forebears?

The Emerging Literacy Landscape: The Shift From Traditional Literacy to

“Digital Literacy”

An Incredibly Brief Introduction to New Literacies

The examination of the new literacy movement is a relatively recent phenomenon. Scholars such as Buckingham advocate for academic research that examines the affordances, as well as complications, engendered by media texts (2000, p. 120). Livingstone argues for the need to be able to “read” audiovisual material, and she dated this need as starting from as far back as the mid-twentieth century and traces its impact up to the present (Livingstone 2004, p. 1). She also acknowledges the work by policy makers in creating regulatory frameworks that produce an “ICT-literate population,” hence giving an institutional imprimatur regarding the importance of widespread, non-traditional literacies (Livingstone 2004, p. 1). These developments have caused tension in the educational rank-and-file given the highly conflicting views educators have with respect to the mass media (Hobbs, 2004, p. 43) and its role in formal educational environments.

Poaching Anyone? The Moral Argument in Favor of Appropriation

Copy-and-paste practices are perceived as a dichotomy depending on the context involved. In personal and social contexts, the copy-and-paste practice of remixing digital content is seen as largely positive. For example, digitizing broadcast content and sharing it on YouTube is a common, welcome practice among youth. However, when viewed from a formal academic or legal copyright perspective, this different context makes the appropriative characteristics of copy-and-paste practices seem much more negative. In academic circles, copying-and-pasting digital text would be deemed plagiarism, in legal circles this type of appropriation would be seen as copyright infringement.

Henry Jenkins (1988) examined the idea of appropriating text in fan writing for the television show Star Trek. Jenkins referenced Michel de Certeau’s work. De Certeau would characterize the type of fan writing Star Trek fans engaged in as “poaching.” (1984). “Far from being writers … readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 174). deCerteau believes that the act of consumption, as practiced by fans, involves the act of reclaiming textual material “making it one’s own, appropriating or reappropriating it” (1984, p. 166). Further, “‘[f]andom’ is a vehicle for marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into a popular culture” (de Certeau in Jenkins, 1988, p. 472). Still further, “For these fans, Star Trek [and presumably other fan-produced artifacts] is not simply something that can be reread; it is something that can and must be rewritten in order to make it more responsive to their needs, in order to make it a better producer of personal meanings and pleasures” (Jenkins, 1988, p. 472, italics are mine). In Jenkins and de Certeau’s view, presumably the process of reclaiming textual material and the utility it provides consumers/producers outweigh the negatives these practices cause.

In Jenkins’ view, and presumably de Certeau’s view as well, this appropriation is not immoral — the fans often take care of issues of reuse within their fan peer group. “Similarly, the fans often cast themselves not as poachers but as loyalists, rescuing essential elements of the primary text misused by those who maintain copyright control over the program materials. Respecting literary property even as they seek to appropriate it for their own uses, these fans become reluctant poachers, hesitant about their relationship to the program text, uneasy about the degree of manipulation they can legitimately perform on its materials, and policing each other for abuses of their interpretive license” (Jenkins, 1988, p. 473). There are limits to what can be done with appropriated material. It is just the community of consumer-producers who needs to police these transgressions.

Through a combination of de Certeau and Jenkins’ work, a moral argument is made in favor of the appropriation and use of cultural elements, such as text. As Jenkins sums it up — “Consumption becomes production; reading becomes writing; spectator culture becomes participatory culture” (Jenkins, 1988, p. 490). As a result, from de Certeau and Jenkins’ positions, seemingly artificial distinctions between normally dialectical practices such as consumption/production, reading/writing and spectator/participant are reduced, or diminished entirely, when fans become more involved in producing transformative work, such as fan fiction.

Copy/Paste Literacy: A 21st Century Approach Towards Appropriation?

Dan Perkel re-frames the traditional literacy debate within the context of copy-and-paste practices that occur in computer coding created in social networks. Appropriation is fostered in the digital world due to the affordances of both, first, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the main markup language used for displaying web pages and related information that can be displayed in a web browser as well as, second, associated web technologies: “the copying and pasting of blocks of code in a conscious act of selection, manipulation, and appropriation of work done by others” (Perkel, 2006, p. 9). Perkel’s work is an attempt to make sense of, and in some ways provide a justification for, a highly common practice for today’s digital natives — performing variations of the copying-and-pasting of digital content within the context of social networking site. In Perkel’s case, he focuses on MySpace. In MySpace, “[m]embers reuse popular images by copying and pasting an HTML link to any image on the web. They ‘embed’ video, audio, and even games on their profiles. Furthermore, new companies are emerging that encourage people to copy and paste links to nearly every type of media object from one place to another on the Web, including a MySpace profile” (Perkel, 2006, p. 9). As per Perkel, copy-and-paste practices are not a practice confined solely to the MySpace community. Other social networking sites (e.g. Facebook) and digital technology products (e.g. Microsoft Word) also leverage the ability, and practices, of users to engage in copy-and-paste practices.

The interactive practices engendered by users on the MySpace online environment, as well as other analogous digital technologies, continue to exist and arguably proliferate. “Reframing literacy in terms of both social and technical, or medium-dependent, practices helps us understand how these practices are embedded in existing social groups and niches, what they mean to the people who engage in them, and what properties of the media are that facilitate new expressive forms” (Perkel, 2006, p. 13). Social networks, in their myriad forms, are premised on individual actors who interact in these spaces and congregate in social groups. As a result, the copy-and-paste affordances of social networks and other web based and digital technologies promote new forms of expression among youth.

Significance of Copy-And-Paste Literacies

Copy-and-paste practices continue among youth. With the influx of mobile devices that allow virtually perpetual online connectivity, there is little reason to believe that copy-and-paste practices using digital content from the Internet will decrease among youth. The opposite seems more likely.

Copy-and-paste practices are proverbial elephants in the academic room. As educators, we need to figure out a way to leverage pervasive youth copy-and-paste practices so that they become copy-and-paste literacy. And with the influx of digital products that will make multimedia integration and dissemination progressively easier, this issue will not go away and, instead, likely worsen.

References

Benjamin W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.). Illuminations: Essays and reflections. (pp. 217–252). New York, NY: Schocken.

Buckingham, D. (2000). After the death of childhood. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.

Buckingham, D. (2006). Defining digital literacy — What do young people need to know about digital media? Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy. Retrieved from http://www.idunn.no/ts/dk/2006/04/defining_digital_literacy_-_what_do_young_people_need_to_know_about_digital?languageId=2

deCerteau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. (Steven Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press.

Hobbs, R. (2004). A Review of School-Based Initiatives in Media Literacy Education.

American Behavioral Scientist, 48, No. 1, 42–59.

Jenkins, H. III (1988). “Star Trek rerun, reread, rewritten: Fan writing as textual poaching.”

Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 5. 85–107.

Livingstone, S. (2004). Media literacy and the challenge of new information and

Communication technologies. LSE Research Online. London, UK: LSE Research

Online. Retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/1017

Perkel, D. (2006). Copy and paste literacy: literacy practices in the production of a MySpace

profile. Paper presented at the DREAM Conference: Informal Learning and Digital

Media: Constructions, Context, Consequences. September 21–23, Odense, Denmark.