Food, Plagiarism and Information Wastage
We are in the era of networking, where everyone is capable not just to
consume information but to produce it as well. We have the computers, cameras,
and other tools to create something for the consumption of others. We are the
chefs of the digital world, capable of cooking delectable dish and share it
with one another.
As with food, we have the option to cook new ideas and concepts and
share it with other people. We can also borrow someone’s recipe and create
something based from our interpretation of their recipe, which may result in
either a good-tasting dish or one that tastes terrible. Either way, something
new is created, and we learn something out of the experience.
However, it is different when it comes to information.
A quick Google search on plagiarism returned a myriad of definitions
which are alike. I will use this definition found in the website of University
of Miami.
"Plagiarism is the taking of
someone else's words, work, or ideas, and passing them off as a product of your
own efforts. Plagiarism may occur when a person fails to place quotation marks
around someone else's exact words, directly rephrasing or paraphrasing someone
else's words while still following the general form of the original, and/or
failing to issue the proper citation to one's source material."
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By Durova (Wikimedia Commons) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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Copying from someone and failing to attribute the source is dreadful. It
may help in propagating the idea of that someone, but failing to credit the
original source will cause for that idea to lose its taste. Even though I take
pleasure in trying out new ideas, I would like to know the original source so
that I may understand it better, and perhaps I may come up with a different
interpretation of the idea.
Just like in relay games, wherein a message is passed around one
another, it is most likely that the end receiver will hear a very different
message compared with the original message. This explains why we need to hear
it from the original source; they can explain it much better and clearer.
In the book Development Communication Praxis, it is noted that
information scientists are starting to realize that in spite of the increase in
the quantity of information, there seems to be a need to improve the quality of
information generated.
Plagiarism lowers the quality of the generated information, and in turn
will produce another with much lower quality. If we tolerate plagiarism, we are
not helping in the production of critical-thinking individuals. This copy-paste
mentality, if taken on a larger level, will soon drive any society into
oblivion. We will instead become a society that cannot think for ourselves,
relying on others to feed us information.
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| By Dahn (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons |
Information wastage can be compared to a pot of
soup. If more people will want to have a taste of that soup, a new pot must be
cooked. But what if you’ll just add water to it? Surely, there will be more
enough soup for everyone, but that soup will taste very bland. As more and more
water is added, the soup will no longer taste like the original; we might as
well throw it away.
Information is abundant, inexpensive, and ubiquitous. As multimedia
scholars, we should promote critical thinking and despise plagiarism, so that
we may be able to cook something new and inspire others to be critical thinkers
as well.
References
- Flor, A. G. (2009). Developing Societies in the Information Age: A Critical Perspective. Retrieved from academia.edu: http://www.academia.edu/189595/Developing_Societies_in_the_Information_Age_A_Critical_Perspective
- Flor, A. G. (2007). Development Communication Praxis. UP Open University.
- Pot, J. (2012, 07 28). Eating Only Dessert: Why Your Information Diet Is Probably Terrible. Retrieved from makeuseof.com: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/eating-dessert-information-diet-terrible/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=2012-10-01
- Soup Kitchen. (n.d.). Retrieved from wikipedia.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_kitchen
- What Constitutes Plagiarism? (n.d.). Retrieved from University of Miami: http://www.bio.miami.edu/dana/161/plagiarism.html
