What is Creativity and Self-Expression in the Digital Age? #EDCMOOC

Image credit: Brain Pickings

Maria Popova reviews Kenneth Goldsmith's "Uncreative Writing" in her literary website Brain Pickings. I know, from my own teaching experiences, that the digital revolution has made plagiarism easier for students, and -- having grown up in the age of cutting and pasting, sampling and re-purposing -- many of my students don't seem to have ethical qualms about doing this.

The surprising thing is that there is even a debate about whether or not the standards and the ethics around plagiarism should change. At first glance, the idea of the legitimacy of plagiarism seems to be a huge concession to dishonesty and intellectual laziness. The argument that students don't know the difference between plagiarism and their own creative work seems almost condescending. The notion that the technology has changed our ethical and intellectual standards seems to yield too much to technological determinism.

But Goldsmith seems to be making the argument that one cannot avoid self-expression, even when appropriating someone else's words -- or images or sounds. He argues that one expresses oneself, even in how one selects and reassembles content that others have created. One cannot avoid self-expression when one is working with, and processing, text.

Digital postings are rife with mash-ups and sampling in newer and more creative ways, unintended and unanticipated by the original creators of content. Goldsmith argues that this has always been the case, even with the analogue technology the predated the digital age. But digitized content pushes this trend into hyper-drive.

Goldsmith's book suggests that the change we are seeing, facilitated by digital technology, is not a change in ethical standards so much as it is a change in how we understand the notion of "creativity" and whether or not "originality" is as rare, and as difficult to achieve, as we once thought it was. It raises the question as to whether or not, in the past, we have over-emphasized the notion of creating text from scratch as the only form of creativity and originality in the process of self-expression. It suggests that appropriation of content, re-purposed, is a legitimate form of self-expression, and that the very act of selecting content and re-working it, is unavoidably self-expressive.

Has our understanding of plagiarism changed in the digital culture? If it has, did digital technology make this change inevitable, or would this change have occurred even without digital technology? Here are several different views on audio sampling, which is a forerunner of current arguments about "plagiarism."