Bennett states in his criticism that the author is the "owner" of his or her work and that the labor of the person is intellectual property. This thinking explains our aversion to plagiarism in academics.
Ownership is clear when the copyright is present, but how do we prove ownership on the Internet? "Borrowing" occurs incessantly, and sites such as Wikipedia show layer upon layer of so-called authorship. These sites are owned by no one, and the origin of ideas becomes increasingly hazy. While the Internet often reflects and increases alienation and individualism, it seems to me that this layering of authorship resembles the original storytelling that Ohmann celebrates. Perhaps we are regressing into a form of synthesis.
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Yes, you're absolutely on to something karen. Plagiarism is dependent on a particular cultural economy, and it is a feature of the internet and of web culture that this economy is being fractured and reorganized. Among other things, it's hard to say what the status of originality, or even of composition, really is. A lot of "content" on the net is cut and paste from a wide variety of sources. Is this a failure of the imagination, or is it in fact how language and thought always work. Are our thoughts our own, or are they cut and paste jobs, recombinations of text from others.
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