I know that personally I used comments sections as idea scratch pads and have rarely looked back at what I've written. Blogs, too, are, by nature, reactionary, which is to say it is usually someone else's ideas being responded to or linked to.
It's important to consider the politics of plagiarism, because they can be significant. A plagiarist can see his or her career spiral downward forever after a rightful conviction, depending on the severity.
But there have been notable exceptions, it seems, to the pariah status that usually accompanies being outed: historian and PBS regular, Doris Kearns Goodwin,
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
More recently, president-elect Joe Biden has been accused of being a plagiarist -- first at law school many years ago, and then just last year with his Climate Plan. Of course, all his speeches are written for him, though he, like all lying pollies, take credit for them.
Even one of the world's most popular (and quirky) philosophers, Slavoj Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek, was accused of "self-plagiarizing" (or was it self-flagellizing?), after he sold a piece to the NYT that appeared elsewhere before. More like double-dipping than plagiarizing. Meh.
The Digital Age has not only complicated things exponentially, but it is an important aspect to consider here. Before the Internet, the distribution of new ideas was actually kind of limited by comparison to the now. Being bound to printed material limited the speed of new information acquisition, while also naturally limiting (time) the breadth of new learning.
The world was full of select experts we relied on for knowledge attainment. But, just as the Incas and Egyptians were building pyramids in synchronicity but in ignorance of each other, so, too, we can assume that more than one person has thought the same idea simultaneously, or thereabouts, and is not necessarily cribbing from another.
In short, a person might exclaim, "I've heard that somewhere before," without a necessary link to another source. The Internet has brought lots of overlap and Intertextuality that didn't exist the same way before.
Nevertheless, the Internet no doubt adds to the problem. Academia has taken it seriously enough that it now forces most students to submit work through a plagiarism detection system, such as
But maybe the actual purpose of this detection system is more devious. For instance, the controlling interest in TII is held by venture capitalist Warburg Pincus, which is determined to make big money. Leading to the questions: Who owns the data (students or TII)? Who has access? What is to prevent the corporate purloining of brilliant student work in its early development - TII as plagiarist? That venture capitalist is making money somehow.
Getting back to the collage poetry stoush we started with, while a TII might have stopped the dead poet suicidey in his tracks, it occurred to me as I limned the account that a well-read contest judge might have done a similarly effective job, but the Internet seems to have made that portion of our brains lazy now.
When I was a young student academics were eager to determine if a poor boy, like Shakespeare, could "really" write such high flown verse; now all any one seems to wonder is if he was gay.
Actually, I was also quite peeved about the collage stoush because
Not only are we mooning over the sweet years of the Cold War, but some folks welcome the return of a literary canon. I'd go further and make it mandatory that everyone read the classics and learn Latin.
I haven't even mentioned class war yet. High language, with its myriad high-hailed ideas, has always been a middle class proprietary conceit. People have long been excluded from certain strata of society, based on their language characteristics. And the influence of one's economic background on the perception of one's linguistic ability, and certainly originality, is a common place.
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