Monday, April 8, 2013

Communication and Culture - Food, Plagiarism and Information Wastage


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."


The Tragic History of Hamlet
By Durova (Wikimedia Commons) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Plagiarism: My Name Is Paste, Copy Paste
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


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