Plagiarism: Oh My!

The official rules governing citation, stemming from Enlightenment notions of authorship, ownership, and originality, and the distinction between ideas and expression of ideas, are simply not accepted by today's college students. They quote constantly in their ordinary lives and rarely have to cite their sources. They are more in tune with Lethem's "ecstasy of influence" than with Bloom's "anxiety of influence." The ecstasy is magnified when influence is shared. And when it is shared, there is no need to cite explicitly. The unstated but commonly known, though shared experience, bonds peers. The academic premium placed on citation merely emphasizes the distance between academic practice and students' values as expressed in their daily lives.
The kind of inadvertent or careless plagiarism that results from uncertainty about the norms of citation in part reveals the ongoing way in which intellectual property is regarded. And in fact, evidence from linguistics and linguistic anthropology supports students' sense of the instability of origins and the convergence of invention. While quoting lines from popular culture offers a chance to celebrate shared identity, the painstaking tracing demanded in academic writing reinforces the distance between student and teacher. We cannot improve student practice without acknowledging that at least two different ideologies of quotation are in effect. We faculty ignore this at our peril. (Did I invent that phrase? Plagiarize it? Would I be found guilty of copying? Is it a cliche? Did someone own it once but now it has slipped into the public domain? Oh, the anxiety of influence.)
The ideal-or myth-of originality does not drive this generation of students. They are more interested in sharing, belonging, resembling, converging. Thus plagiarism-the violation of originality-does not horrify them, does not cause revulsion or despair. They can be taught to understand that it is a breach of academic practice, but without their feeling it intensely, the fear of plagiarism is not likely to retain its grip.
Ideas of the author and intellectual property rights point to another, even more profound mismatch between faculty and students in how they view the role of the self in all its words and actions. This aspect of contemporary life is shaped by technology, as well as by the values of social and psychological change sweeping over twenty-first century American youth. I call it a shift from the ideal of the authentic self to that of the performance self, and see in it yet another reason why today's students may engage unapologetically in a variety of behaviors that the academy lumps together as "plagiarism." Susan D. Blum. My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture. pp. 58-59. (2009)