The Need for Content and the New Plagiarism
This is nothing that new or shocking. It is, however, semi-original. Earlier today I read a piece by Douglas Coupland in the New York Times. I enjoyed it and my first instinct was to share it, here on this blog. Hooray for content! I do this from time to time and I see it all the time on other sites, blogs, etc. While it seems harmless enough, it's cheap.
Too often blogs (including this one) reshare a piece of writing in the interest of generating more content. More content means more hits, more readers. More, more, more. What it does not mean is original thought or commentary. It does not mean a new piece of writing that encourages a laugh or a thought or an emotion. It's not that every original piece does that (and again, I'll raise my hand and accept some guilt), but it might.
I read a quote recently about writing (and I've seen it more times than I can count from other writers) that writing is made up of hard work and discipline. It takes place when the house is quiet and dark. When done properly,it can make the writer wish they were doing almost anything else. It spurs the creation of rationalization and excuses. It causes a tightness in the chest that makes one wonder why they're sitting there, trying to breathe life into a word, a phrase, a paragraph. In a sense, despite many not being paid for it, writing is not for amateurs.
With blogs writing has morphed into this thing for amateurs. Worse yet, a new crop of professional writers has emerged. A new plagiarism has emerged. It's not what you might remember from college where a student lifts a passage from an obscure book to supplement their paper without citing it. It's an idea that all writing and thought is content or raw materials to be used to beef up your site. It exists for your commentary. While most writers I've known are happy their work is read and mentioned, this new plagiarism saps the discourse of new ideas. It makes us lazy.
Television news seems to be especially bad at this. Their experts are personalities who generate sound bites from multiple sources and then parrot it out on show after show. The television news media then picks it up and runs it over and over as news. The cycle then continues when the information is taken back to the blogs, recycled again for the talking heads to harvest and take back to the television news panels.
Original thought and analysis are hard. Sometimes it's appropriate to use a piece to springboard into another thought piece. Sometimes it's not. When it's not, I'm going to try to share things more often via my Google Reader feed, at least then it's just called promotion.
