This was an extremely well-attended panel — I counted at least 17 people either sitting on the floor or standing in the corners and along the walls, and yes, it got a little warm in the room. By happy accident, I got to sit next to Jim Ridolfo and chat with him for a few minutes, and there were plenty of other tech luminati in the audience, as well.
Jim Porter began by giving a broad overview of the four panelist’s brief presentations, and I’m adraid my notes aren’t nearly as good as the proposal abstract, so I hope you won’t be impatient with me for heavy use of quotation: according to Porter, Latterell, DeVoss, Eilola, and Selber, “Composing in the digital age is different,” and “the copy-paste function, downloading, [and] peer-to-peer filesharing […] change everything. Plagiarism [is] a common practice [… and …] perhaps even a literacy skill. Plagiarism makes sense. Remixing is how communities build common values; it is how writers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Yet the issue is nuanced: We believe in the ethic of fair use; textual theft, fraud, and misappropriation are real problems. […] We need to find an ethical middle space that encourages fair use but that also promotes free exchange, frequent sharing, and digital remixing—practices essential for building communities, cultures, and coalitions.”
Kate Latterell began with a broad multimedia sampling of remix clips, accompanied by commentary. (I had to strain to hear some of the sound, and I was near the front of the room, so I hope she might think about audio amplification for future presentations.) Sampling and collage are both remix strategies, she argued, and remix stands as our contemporary metaphor for revision, re-interpretation, and hybridity. (I’ll admit, I’m somewhat in agreement with the critique of this definition as an unnecessarily vague collapsing of categories, but that shouldn’t take away from the superlative merits of Latterell’s presentation.) So Latterell asked the perpetually necessary question, the question that modernity can’t stop asking itself: with the overwhelming weight of textual tradition, is there no space for originality, or must we — as Emerson suggests — continue in a practice of perpetual quotation? The pace of the presentation of multimedia remixes — and its juxtaposition with quotations — was swift, and worked well. Sampling, Latterell argued, assumes or recognizes a shared network of meaning, and plays games with memory. It implies a breakdown of known truth and meaning, and implies as well a breakdown of the author/audience relationship — but is this breakdown, Latterell asked, a necessary condition of our contemporary culture? (I’m afraid I’ve here failed to do justice to Latterell’s presentation in my merely textual account, especially with all her carefully ordered multimedia clips and their interpolation with explanations and quotations from media theory.)
According to Jim Porter, there’s a simple view of plagiarism that manifests itself in the plagiarism statements of syllabi, and in the rhetoric of the popular media. Plagiarism is bad and unacceptable; non-plagiarism is good and acceptable. But there’s a gray area in between the two, an area variable and context-dependent. We need to be rhetorical about plagiarism, Porter argued: the particular circumstances of use matter deeply in terms of what gets counted as plagiarism. Is it OK, for example, to use somebody else’s HTML/CSS design template and plug in your own content? What if it’s for a history class? A Web design class? A workplace with an open-source ethic?
In some ways, we are all plagiarists, and according to Porter, the question really ought to be: what constitutes allowable plagiarism?
Using boilerplate text? (In my work for one of the biggest nonprofits in DC, text got recycled all the time for lobbying efforts.) Using a common syllabus? (I’ve taken assignments and teaching ideas from Donna LeCourt, Mariolina Salvatori, Joe Harris, Pallavi Sharma, Steve Carr, Jen DiGrazia, Rich Purcell, Christa Cardillo, Margaret Price, Peggy Woods, Lois Williams, Charles Moran, Lauren Rosenberg, and too many other colleagues to count.)What about the format of a CV? What about raiding a bibliography? Or quoting your own writing? (Asked Porter: have you done any of these things? A room with raised hands.) The compelling question, Porter suggests, is this: is it the theft of words that is the problem, or the theft of work? (Mike’s editorializing: hmm — that sounds to me like a question a Marxist would ask.)
Da`nielle Nicole DeVoss proposed that the writing teacher’s computer is, in effect, a lawsuit zone. There exists the romantic in-the-garret view of the writer, which stands opposed to the writer’s collaborative and wired digital reality. In between these two conceptions, how do we negotiate copyright and ownership? How do we talk about changing frameworks of ownership between those two conceptions of ownership? According to Da`nielle, the one-way transmission model of traditional print publication is problematic, but the multi-dircectional possibilities of digital publishing offer genuinely useful alternative constructions to the ideology of scarcity and permission. (I’ve seen Da`nielle talk before, and she’s a highly accomplished presenter, but I have to confess that she seemed a little hyper-caffeinated this time, which made me struggle to keep up with how her words meshed with the text on her slides.)
Stuart Selber began his presentation (Johndan Johnson-Eilola was unable to attend) by showing the now-famous (and hilarious) trailer for The Shining remixed into Shining, a sort of Hugh Grant style heartwarmer. The trailer, Selber argues, shows what a remix can do in terms of radically reorienting cultural artifacts in relation to their context, and also exhibits the impressive skills — intellectual and technical — that good remixes require. And yet the many folks who are contributing to the contemporary massive spike of plagiarism concerns, even in a time where the sea change in the nature of communication technologies is obvious and ubiquitous, don’t seem to “get” how remixes operate or why they’re important: mainstream notions of authorship “are not keeping up with advances in writing technologies,” said Selber, and our continued disciplinary focus on originality backs our students — who live in and work with the cultural changes wrought by these developing technologies — into a corner. It’s hardly a new idea to propose that we redirect the goals of writing instruction, but what might be new is the way in which we alter our practice away from the panoptic surveillance of the performance of original work based upon ideas of an always-hidden individual genius: we focus so much on that final textual object and its qualities, rather than looking at the actions and results of writing. Discard the focus on the need for originality, and look instead at purpose, at problem-solving. What might happen if we view writing as the assemblages of design patterns comprising numerous and heterogeneous small-scale interface elements? In theory, a textual designer could draw upon multiple sets of design patterns and other elements without ever actually creating anything “original” but at the same time composing — compositing? — a wholly new and complete assemblage.
So let’s focus on assemblage as a value, argued Selber. Let’s focus on citation practices as a primary value rather than something secondary to or supportive of the alleged originality of a text. If an assemblage is valued for its function, rather than for its place in the hierarchy of originality and value, students’ impulse to hide the origins of the texts they draw from — the impulse to efface citation — might vanish. In such a context, creativity would come to equal problem solving rather than originality; researching, filtering, assembling, and acknowledgement privileged as the primary form of creativity, rather than the myth of solely-authored romantic-individualist creativity.
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