I recently came across a particularly glaring plagiarism that highlighted the goofy (and troubling) game of telephone that can happen to information as it circulates through the web. I’ll call the student Cac. It didn’t take me long to diagnose Cac’s speech outline as an out-and-out plagiarism. It was a shoddy piece of work all around—supposedly an outline for a Persuasive Speech about Plastic Bag Recycling, Cac had left out the requisite Topic, Central Idea, and Specific Purpose Statement that belongs at the top of each outline. Cac also neglected to shove his stolen text into a speech outline format—it was laid out in bullet points, obviously ripped from an advocacy website’s FAQ.
Suspicious, I pulled out a short phrase and googled it: “about 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.” The first hit did the trick. Cac had copy-pasted the entire script, complete with headings—“Facts about Plastic Bags,” “What We Can Do,” “Benefits of Using Reusable Bags.” But did Cac realize, I immediately wondered, that he was plagiarizing from the National Environmental Agency of Singapore?
But I soon wondered which website Cac had ripped this info from; my search for this “about 2.5 billion plastic bags” factoid revealed the same info on many, many sites. Some were repeating it in the context of Singapore (which it no doubt belongs in, given that one of the facts relates to landfills in that country), but many weren’t. The first example I found drew conclusions about Malaysia’s plastic bag usage based on Singapore’s. No biggie. But then I saw a website for RV-lovers based in Canada that used the very same stat for Canada’s plastic shopping bag usage. And Todaysparent.com claimed that “Ontarians alone” used 2.5 billion shopping bags yearly. Even the city of Alexandria, Virginia employed the same stat for justification of their Environmental Action Plan, although in their usage it was unclear who used that many, just that they were used. An online Pakistani daily newspaper listed almost all of the very same “facts about plastic bags,” and they made the 2.5 billion stat sound as though it was global, not national. Even an American company peddling reusable bags used this fact, suggesting that it was the U.S. that used 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.
I could go on.
Doing some quick Internet research of my own pulled up figures for U.S. yearly plastic bag usage between 100 billion and 380 billion—even more stunning numbers than the 2.5 billion Cac was so impressed by. (And the global annual figure seems to be closer to 1 trillion. If my sources are to be believed.) False information on the web isn’t much of a newsflash, but this incident quickly became less about plagiarism for me (a separate issue) and more about the minefield of Google when used by students for (legit, non-plagiarized) research. Sure, 2.5 billion is a persuasive number any way you slice it, and it’s being employed to make the same argument each time: plastic bags are bad, and we use an awful lot of them.
Somewhere In The World
But each of these filchers was too careless to put the stats in context, or to read closely enough to figure out exactly what the stat was referring to. It calls to mind Jeff Jarvis’s question (referencing Nicholas Carr) at the recent Symposium: does Google make us stupid? (And another of one of his questions: how do we structure the information that we have?) The breaking down of media orthodoxies through Jarvis’s “conversation as content” model perhaps works best when it relates to an individual journalist/blogger taking corrections and comments from a diverse and vibrant peanut gallery, but there’s easily 2.5 billion cases of downright incorrect information streaking across the web, posted on sites without external or internal fact-checkers.
A few years ago I presented what I thought was clear evidence to one of my students that she had plagiarized from a particular website, the first one that had popped up on Google when I plugged in a striking phrase. She unequivocally denied that she had ever copied anything from that site. It turned out that she might have been right, since I later found more than a dozen sites that reproduced those paragraphs verbatim, without citations. Hard to make a case to students that plagiarism=stealing when they have so much support for the position that “everybody” does it.
In Michiku Kakutani’s review of Mark Helperin’s Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, she pulls out the following quote:
A valid point, and one which supports the argument that digital literacy should be a prominent component of every college’s general education program. Of course, the rest of the review skewers Helperin as an “an uptight, modernity-hating curmudgeon” who has, it seems, uninformed contempt for the online world. Hillary certainly comes across as a much more thoughtful critic of the way information flows these days, and its implications for higher education. The old rules about reading critically still apply. There’s just so much more text readily available.
@Dennis sounds like your student was guilty of plagiarism, just not from the source with which you confronted her. I propose that from now on we refer to this as The Maureen Dowd Defense.