Last month, Lauren blogged about Helene Hegemann, a 17-year old author from Germany whose novel Axolotl Roadkill has become a best-seller and a finalist for a major prize in fiction—despite the fact that entire passages of the book were lifted from a novel by another author. After reading Lauren’s post, I decided to assign the New York Times article on Hegemann to the students in my Writing II course here at Baruch. We read the article last week, and while discussing it in class, I was quite surprised by a lot of what my students had to say; their comments really got me thinking about how they view both the web and the act of writing.
For one thing, though I tend to (mostly) agree with them, I was shocked to find that all 26 of my students thought this was a case of shameless and unacceptable plagiarism—not a single one of them bought the idea of Hegemann as “the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new.” Furthermore, despite being members of this generation themselves, many of the students said, to my surprise, that they find that “whirring flood of information” intimidating at times, particularly when it comes to the web. As one student spoke about how she’s leery of using online sources for academic assignments both because they might not be as “good” as print sources and because she doesn’t want to be accused of plagiarism, I noticed a number of other students nodding in agreement. Yet, though students certainly need to use more caution and discretion with online sources than with print ones, they shouldn’t be afraid to use the web for academic assignments. As teachers, it’s our job to help them learn how to use the web cautiously and properly (for what I think is a particularly useful resource for students regarding this, see UC Berkeley’s Guide to Evaluating Web Pages), but perhaps we also need to place more emphasis on teaching students how to harness the web’s endless possibilities. Personally, I’ve always assumed that because my students are the so-called representatives of the “information age” that this automatically means they make constant use of the web, not just for socializing, but also for academic purposes. Our conversation in class forced me to re-think this assumption, and has also left me wondering how many of my students really understand how to make the most of what the web has to offer them as students (and beyond the worlds of Facebook, twitter, and youtube).
I was also surprised to find that my students might not have come down as hard on Hegemann had she been a musician rather than a writer. We discussed in class how mixing and sampling are prominent in the music industry today, with artists like Girl Talk making enormously successful careers this way:
Yet, while most of the students didn’t think that what Girl Talk does is either “wrong” or unoriginal, they all argued that Hegemann’s version of mixing is unacceptable and that the praise her work has received is undeserved. For some reason, it seemed to them that there is something almost holy about the written word on the page—that to lift that and put it into your own work—even if you give credit where credit is due (which Hegemann didn’t)—is somehow both more unethical and less original than to, say, re-use an old MJ song in a new remix. In general, they were willing to allow authors far less room for “artistic play” than they were willing to allow musicians and other artists (photographers, filmmakers, etc), which I found curious, fascinating, and perhaps a little troubling. As we begin the seventh annual Ethics Week at Baruch today, I can’t help but wonder if academia’s constant emphasis on stamping out plagiarism hasn’t made some students a little fearful of the writing process—or, at the very least, caused them to view writing as more “restrictive” and less creative than other forms of art.