Introduction

Information literacy narrative

WRT 109 and 205 experiences in teaching information literacy

Plagiarism and textual access

In an article the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Cheryl Geisler and her coauthors track a phenomenon with which we are all familiar: the textual revolution in which we find ourselves. When text moves from print to the online environment, say Geisler et al., a variety of issues arise, including "making electronic text effective, managing the interplay of visual and verbal, establishing credibility online, controlling information overload, developing new techniques for information retrieval, and understanding texts as intellectual property" (280). In the online environment the audience is no longer as localized, predictable, and knowable as it was (or as we imagined in was) in print publication. Nor is text unitary, linear, and cumulative. In this "new sort of textuality," text is space (281), and it can include "color, sound, images, video, words, and icons to express . . . messages," necessitating attention to "typography and understanding"; "print and screen differences"; "visuals and readability"; "ethics and visual information"; "credibility"; "information overload"; "information retrieval"; and intellectual property (282-289).

Part of our shared awareness of this textual revolution is our attentiveness to the ways in which a wide range of people are using new media to handle text in ways that, when we faculty were receiving our own college educations, would have been readily branded unethical—plagiarism. Because I am identified as an expert on this topic of plagiarism, I am invited to speak here today. The organizers of this conference perceive some link between the textual revolution, plagiarism, and information literacy. And I agree. I see it, too, though I'm still in the process (and perhaps always will be) of articulating and tracing the connection.

In the lay consciousness (and to a significant extent in academic culture, as well) the promiscuous access to text on the Internet that today's writers have is readily identified as the link between the textual revolution and plagiarism. And the promiscuity of online text, of course, leads to social disease (social disease being a euphemism for what was, back in The Day, called venereal disease). According to common logic, this social/textual disease has infected so many individuals that the society itself has become diseased. Last week, for example, a story in the Charlotte Observer began, "There's an epidemic of plagiarism. It seems there's a new outbreak every day. Everywhere you look, people are stealing the work of others and claiming it as their own" (Robarchek). Also last week, Laura Mechling wrote in the New York Sun,

Plagiarism has emerged as the scandal spectator sport du jour, with stories of criminal copycatting threatening to elbow Cynthia Nixon's Sapphic leanings out of the press spotlight. Once the cardinal no-no of academia, the act of copying is, well, being copied. Students and dons are playing fast and loose with their papers and books, ripping off other people's ideas and phrases as if the Library of Congress was some all-you-can-eat Szechuan buffet.

And this week, the Express-News of Easton, Pennsylvania, has a story whose headline alludes to a "plagiarism plague."

In much of the discourse about the "epidemic" of plagiarism, the assumption is that access itself is the immediate cause of the disease. Hence a few misguided teachers actually try to forbid their students to work dialogically online.

Previous revolutions in access to text, such as those precipitated by the advent of the printing press and again by mass education, also incited cultural fears. Today, the cultural fears are focused on issues of property and especially on students' incursions on the words and ideas of others. If, however, we consider not just access to text but also textual relationships, we can gain a more tempered, critical understanding of what is being called Internet plagiarism.

Indisputably, the Internet makes texts readily available for plagiarizing. Jeffrey R. Young names the venues: "In recent years, professors have been frustrated by the way more and more students use the Internet to cheat—by plagiarizing the work of other students, by copying material from online reference works, by buying term papers from online paper-writing companies, and by other means" (Young, "Plagiarism"). Seth Stevenson surveys the possibilities for procuring entire papers online, orders a custom-written paper for a silly, impossible topic of his own device, and offers wry commentary on both the purchasing of papers and on assignments that prompt students not to write.

When the custom paper came back, it was all I'd dreamed. Representative sentence: "The novel's diverse characters demonstrate both individually and collectively the fixations and obsessions that bind humanity to the pitfalls of reality and provide a fertile groundwork for the semiotic explanation of addictive behavior." Tripe. The paper had no thesis and in fact had no body—not one sentence actually advanced a cogent idea. I'm guessing it would have gotten a C+ at Brown—maybe even a B-. . . . If I were a just slightly lesser person, I might be tempted by this service. One custom paper off the Web: $71.80. Not having to dredge up pointless poppycock for some po-mo obsessed, overrated lit-crit professor: priceless.

Yet I believe that we have to seriously challenge the easy equation of access and plagiarism. Why would increased access to text cause a dramatic rise in plagiarism? Is the relationship indeed something like a disease, in which the presence of so much readily available text infects writers, lowering their moral resistance, causing them to plagiarize, and thus infecting them with a social disease? The comparison is grounded in a sense of writing as an inherently moral (or potentially immoral) activity, and in a concomitant equation of morality and disease. The moral person is a healthy person; the immoral, diseased. With the proliferation of online texts, the cultural imposition of standards succumbs in an orgy of text.

Perhaps the relationship between the Internet and the perceived rise in plagiarism is not so much one of writers' disease and textual promiscuity as it is of readers' access to the plagiarized texts. It is from this logic that online plagiarism-detection programs are derived: if unethical writers have access to text online and plagiarize from it, then gatekeeping teachers can also access the plagiarized text and catch the offenders (see, for example, Young, "Cat and Mouse").

Many are inclined to accomplish the gatekeeping task with automated plagiarism-detection software. In 2002, says Andrea L. Foster, the Turnitin.com plagiarism-detection service claimed 400 client colleges in the U.S. Although the Internet provides readers' as well as writers' access to a plethora of texts, readers who wish to sort through those texts in order to gauge a writer's originality or plagiarism are faced with a potentially time-consuming task. Hence services like Turnitin.com offer to perform—and automate—that task. In the "Plagiarism and the Internet" link from its "What Is Plagiarism" page, Turnitin promotes what they ominously call "preemptive education" and implies that their proprietary service will reduce the labor of catching plagiarists and will also raise teachers' plagiarism-catching success rate. In their endorsement of the software, Atkins and Nelson, too, emphasize its labor-saving potential for teachers (104). However, when James P. Purdy compares two services (EduTie and EVE2) with the free searching available at Google, he recommends against his college's purchase of these or similar services. "Because Google, a free service, generally performed on a par with these for-profit services, there is no obvious advantage in purchasing them. In general, these for-profit services appear to cause more problems than they solve" (9). Some of those problems, including the violation of students' intellectual property rights when gatekeeping teachers are required to contribute students' work to services such as Turnitin.com, are outlined by Foster and have been successfully challenged at McGill University. (If you're interested in following the McGill story, you might want to start at the conclusion, with the Grinberg source, and then Google your way back through the coverage in U.S. and Canadian commercial and student media. When last I checked the URLs in the list of works cited that I've distributed, they were all still live as open sources, but of course if they aren't when you get around to them, you can probably locate copies in your library's databases. I can make these access recommendations to you only because I've managed to acquire some rudimentary skills in contemporary information literacy.)

Regardless of whether the gatekeeper uses a proprietary service or free Internet searching, the digitized plagiarism-catching response to the proliferation of online texts simplifies and thus obscures a fundamental and more important fact: In the online environment, both readers and writers have ready access to the same set of texts. This fact has implications far broader—and potentially more important—than the catching of plagiarists.

If both writers and readers have ready access to the same set of texts, textual culture has suddenly become a much more shared phenomenon. Elizabeth Eisenstein and other historians of print culture have noted the revolution in access to text that was occasioned first by the printing press and then again by the spread of mass literacy, a revolution that has been traced by a scholars such as Carey and Miller. A third revolution in access to text is underway now.

With so much text universally accessible (at least potentially), readers are suddenly detecting far more plagiarism than ever before. "Are today's students more unethical than in years past?" asks Brian Hansen, the Congressional Quarterly researcher who interviewed me in 2003. My answer is, "How would we know? On what basis could comparisons be made?" The very fact that the question arises, though, indicates a cultural fear that this might indeed be the case. That fear arises from a belief in widespread plagiarism—plagiarism that, because of boundless access to text, cannot be controlled. And that belief arises from the availability of texts online not just to writers but to readers. It is readers' access to copious text that makes them believe in writers' plagiarism. Their fear that an absence of control over access to text means greater abuse of text then leads to a sense that something must be done. Here I quote from Enos and Borrowman's analysis:

The Internet does not have the controls placed on it that traditional media, such as television and print, do. In such an open forum, traditional notions of authorship and ethos are challenged. And when there is a challenge, the temptation is to retreat into tradition, into the comfortable world of the known-and-familiar. (95)

Something (so goes the reasoning that Enos and Borrowman describe) must be done to control the obscene proliferation of text. The "what must be done" is seldom to allow the new textual circumstances to revise the culture's thinking about textuality, but more commonly to redouble efforts to enforce the principles that obtained prior to the revolution. That these principles themselves derive from the earlier textual revolution instigated by the printing press is a fact not recognized in the culture.

Plagiarism and the textual revolution

I'd like to make this argument specific to the instructional efforts of higher education, and I'd like to argue that the biggest problem that academic culture faces with plagiarism right now is neither a decline in students' morals nor an increase in textual appropriation, but a failure of academic culture to represent plagiarism as not only moral and textual but also relational.

Students who plagiarize may regard the production of text as a procedural matter unconnected to reader-writer relations and to the activity of learning. Instead, they may regard the production of text as an issue of economic capital: the text can be bought or stolen and then transferred to a teacher, in exchange for a grade. We faculty are shocked by this; surely we are witnessing a moral decline!

But before we leap to that conclusion, we should listen to the theories and research of information specialists and apply them to our concerns about Internet plagiarism. One of these scholars, Manuel Castells, describes what he calls a "new sociotechnical paradigm" emerging from the current "centrality of knowledge generation and information processing." Castells compares this sociotechnical paradigm to the control of energy in "the industrial society" (37). The emergence of the sociotechnical paradigm, he says, is not just a result of technology as "science and machines" but also of "social and organizational technology" (39).

We will benefit, I believe, from applying this analysis to the question of Internet plagiarism: Internet plagiarism is not simply an issue of access—a simplistic access through a mere "technology as 'science and machines.'" In a much more complex way, Internet plagiarism is an issue of textual and literate relationships' having been changed by what Castells calls "social and organizational technology." He calls contemporary society "'information-al,' in order to indicate that the social attributes of information generation and information processing go beyond the impact of information technologies and of information itself. . ." (37-38). It's not just the technology itself that is at issue; if we're looking simplistically at technology and the access to text it provides, no wonder we're doing stupid things like forbidding our students to use the Internet or requiring them to submit their work to mechanized plagiarism-checking services.

The far more important issue is the changes in interpersonal, textual, literate, and informational relationships that the new technology signifies. These changed relationships, I would argue, contribute to the so-called plagiarism epidemic far more than do the technology itself and the access to text that it provides.

Plagiarism and the literacy revolution

Let's consider, then, the possible definitions of "social and organizational technology," far exceeding any simplistic notions of access to text through new technology. The revolution in which we presently find ourselves surpasses its predecessors. Far more than a proliferation of text or a proliferation of access to text is occurring here; we are also experiencing a radical redefinition of our collective relationship to text. This is a revolution in the nature of literacy itself. Our concerns about plagiarism mark our awareness of that revolution, and our desire to contain it by asserting the values of print literacy.

When Mechling calls plagiarism "the scandal spectator sport du jour," she identifies plagiarism as a hot media topic, which indeed it is. My Google news alerts on plagiarism deliver citations to me daily, and sometimes those citations are numerous. Media around the world—ABC News, NPR, and newspapers from Singapore to Norway—are energetically covering the plagiarism topic, usually focusing on Internet plagiarism; Turnitin.com; plagiarizing journalists, preachers, deans, and professors; or some combination thereof. So yes, it's a spectator sport enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame—except that this is a very long fifteen minutes. Plagiarism doesn't seem to go away any more than sex scandals do. Plagiarism has become a perennially reliable topic. The coverage of that topic, however, tends either to catalogue incidents or to reaffirm print values. In media coverage I have found only the most brief, remote scraps of analysis or insight. In it is nothing to help us understand the literacy revolution. But its persistence is itself helpful, suggesting that some unassuaged fear is represented by the notion of Internet plagiarism.

I'd like to turn again to Castells for a way of understanding this fear. One way in which Castells specifies the concept of social and organizational technology is by saying that "[a]s complexity and uncertainty become essential characteristics of the new environment in which organizations must operate, the fundamental needs for the management of organizations are those of flexibility and adaptability. . ." (47). Now here is a revolution to be concerned about. We're aware of flexibility and adaptability as market skills that the globalization of capital demands. But we need to consider what those market skills mean for text users working dialogically online.

Academic capital is acquired through the relational activities of learning and writing. People who have, through the process of university educations, acquired facility with learning and writing are people who can deploy the capital of their "skills": they are, in other words, respected by others. This is a fundamental value of the academic enterprise; it is what we teach to. We give writing assignments, and our students are expected to learn about course content by completing those assignments, and they are expected to hone their literate skills as they do the assignments. The texts that students produce are intended to be the results of these relational activities; they are intended to be part of cultural capital.

What we are seeing, in contrast, is the product of goal-oriented writers doing precisely what the current economic market demands: delivering product through the use of their skills in adaptability and flexibility. They are cutting and pasting from the Internet, or simply copying or buying a product that fits the market demands of the teacher's assignment. This, I believe, is a compelling cause for concern. Our sense that Internet plagiarism is widespread and heinous signals our concern that our students do not value the educational enterprise but are instead, even in their university educations, driven by the market skills of adaptability and flexibility.

Reasserting traditional print values in the face of this revolution addresses only the symptom. It doesn't get to the underlying issue; it doesn't teach the value of education itself. Like everyone else whom the media is describing (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jayson Blair, Lawrence Tribe, etc., etc., etc.) our students are perceiving the Internet as a flexible, efficient means to an end—the "end" being neither learning course content nor honing writing skills, but completing the assigned task with minimum investment of time. Catching them in the act, punishing them, or preventing them for doing it may be necessary, but it misses the larger, more difficult point: it does not teach them the joys of learning and the satisfactions of writing. That is where our energies need to go as we face this putative plagiarism epidemic.

Works Cited

Atkins, Thomas, and Gene Nelson. "Plagiarism and the Internet: Turning the Tables." English Journal 90.4 (2001): 101-104.

Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. New York: St. Martin's P, 1992.

Castells, Manuel. "Flows, Networks, and Identities: A Critical Theory of the Informational Society." Critical Education in the Information Age. By Manuel Castells, Ramón Flecha, Paulo Freire, Henry A. Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, and Paul Willis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. 37-64.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.

Enos, Theresa, and Shane Borrowman. "Authority and Credibility: Classical Rhetoric, the Internet, and the Teaching of Techno-Ethos." Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale and Sibylle Gruber. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. 93-110.

Foster, Andrea L. "Plagiarism-Detection Tool Creates Legal Quandary." The Chronicle of Higher Education (17 May 2002): A37.

Geisler, Cheryl, et al. "IText: Future Directions for Research on the Relationship between Information Technology and Writing." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15.3 (2001): 269-308.

Grinberg, Emanuella. "Student Wins Battle Against Plagiarism-Detection Requirement." CNN.com 21 Jan. 2004. 30 Sept. 2004 <http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/01/21/ctv.plagiarism/>.

Hansen, Brian. "Combating Plagiarism." CQ Researcher 13.32 (19 Sept. 2003): 773-796.

Mechling, Lauren. "Plagiarism Is the Sin du Jour." New York Sun 29 Sept. 2004. 30 Sept. 2004 <http://www.nysun.com/article/2386>.

Miller, Thomas P. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1998.

Petty, Precious. "Professor Has Remedy for Plagiarism Plague." Express-News [Easton PA] 3 Oct. 2004. 4 Oct. 2004 <http://www.nj.com/news/expresstimes/pa/index.ssf?/base/news-13/1096794372122220.xml>.

Purdy, James P. "Plagiarism Detection Programs: Test Results and Recommendations." Report from the Center for Writing Studies to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Spring 2003.

Robarchek, Doug. "Plagiarism: Everybody Is Doing It." Charlotte [NC] Observer 27 Sept. 2004. 29 Sept. 2004 <http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/living/health/9769668.htm?1c>.

Stevenson, Seth. "Adventures in Cheating: A Guide to Buying Term Papers Online." Slate 11 Dec. 2001. 1 Apr. 2002 <http://slate.msn.com/?id=2059540>.

Turnitin.com. "Plagiarism and the Internet." n.d. 17 July 2003 <http://www.plagiarism.org/research_site/e_what_is_plagiarism.html>.

Young, Jeffrey R. "The Cat-and-Mouse Game of Plagiarism Detection." The Chronicle of Higher Education 6 July 2001. 26 July 2001 <http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i43/43a02601.htm>.

Young, Jeffrey R. "Plagiarism and Plagiarism Detection Go High Tech." The Chronicle of Higher Education 6 July 2001. 16 July 2003 <http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2001/07/cheat/>.