"The Rise of the Plagiosphere"
Tenner makes some very compelling and troubling points in this article about plagiarism. These systems that could be in place to prevent plagiarism could actually falsely accuse students of plagiarism. As an English major, that is frightening. It would be an awful feeling to be accused of plagiarizing a piece of work that you know you worked extremely hard on.
I also found these lines particularly intriguing: “The concept of the biosphere exposed our environmental fragility; the emergence of the plagiosphere perhaps represents our textual impasse.” To me these lines are saying that expanding our knowledge in one area can lead us to become vulnerable in another. This has happened time and time again within society. It is not a new concept but at the same time, it is an unsettling concept. With that said I am led right into the last lines of the article “…but at least they left us the illusion of the originality of our words. Soon that, too, will be gone.”
January 19, 2010 at 1:51 PM
I agree with your thoughts on how the emergence of the plagiosphere has made us more vulnerable as writers. It is an interesting concept; one that brings to my mind the old phrase "ignorance is bliss".
Before all of the programs were designed that supposedly help catch plagiarists, who knows how original each person was or was not. I have mixed feelings about the software, as most people probably do; outright plagiarism is wrong, especially in the sense of someone ripping off someone else's hard work, but I feel like almost everything nowadays could be , in some vague way, classified vaguely as "plagiarism". I think one would be hard-pressed to find something that is 100% original.
January 19, 2010 at 1:51 PM
I agree, people are bound to have similar thoughts and write something about them. I think we need a new definition of digital plagiarism.
January 19, 2010 at 1:55 PM
I agree with the fact that falsely accusing a student of plagiarism is probably the worse thing that could happen after working so hard on a piece. Also, good quotes to choose.It is true that soon the originality of words will in fact soon be gone because of the way today we can express our writing through the internet. Peoples' writing are becoming more wide spread with the use of the internet and almost every phrase or though seems to have been said at some point on the internet.