Pop Loser

Is BuzzFeed’s content mostly just plagiarism? More importantly, does anyone really care if it is?

As the accusations against Gawker showed a tin ear against how the internet works, the label of plagiarism seems anachronistic in the case of a listicle. Stopera’s lifting is the result of an extreme aggregation logic that approaches words as just another form of content, to be remixed and copied without worrying about their source. The whole internet is trending in this direction: The top story on Reddit on any given day is likely to be some image scanned from a newspaper, a quote misattributed to Ghandi, or a Youtube video of a ’90s cartoon.

Can you plagiarize yourself? Jonah Lehrer has, including in his New Yorker article that I linked to on Monday.

For a writer as prolific as Lehrer, reusing a phrase every so often may be unavoidable. But why would a writer as accomplished as Lehrer become this much of a copy/paste addict? Because he has ceased to be a writer. With the success of his recent books How We Decide and Imagine: How Creativity Works, Lehrer has moved into the idea business. This is the world of TED talks and corporate lectures, a realm in which your thoughts are your product. For the idea man, the written word is just one of many mediums for conveying your message and building your brand.

New York Times piece on the current state of plagiarism in education. (Previously.)

If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.

Plagiarism is a shady, shady business.

For Kavoosi, the future always looks bright. Next he’s looking at renting space in the Burnsville Mall, where he hopes to attract more foot traffic. From there, he hopes to continue to grow the company, possibly franchising to other mall locations. He envisions a day when he has hundreds of writers on the payroll, churning out reams of plagiarized papers for the nation’s callow youth.