Cut and paste world
by Bob on uly 15, 2007
We presently live in a "cut and paste" world, it seems.
The term "cut and paste" originally coming from the editing process in producing a book or .. physically before computers. One would cut out something from a source and paste it with glue onto the working paper sheets for the report or book. It was special glue, too.
Now with computers, and Windows and other Operating Systems and their text editors and word processors, we have the new analagous incarnation of "cut and paste" which means you highlight some text from an open window and paste it into another window. The source could be an article, picture, blog, or whatever. The destination wherein we paste it could be a .., email, blog, as well.
Now one asks this: are we simply cutting and pasting information without reading it or absorbing it ? It would seem many times people cut and paste without reading it. Just a fast reflex movement. I have seen this many times. Someone for example cut and paste some text to read later, but later never comes. This deferral leads to a lack of knowledge. But simply has the potential and saved capacity for knowing what had been written from the cut ...
There's worse. Many project papers for courses at university are made up from cuts and pastes, again without the student reading an comprehending the material. It's just a way to make a paper for one's course. That's not really new, but computers make it so very easy. Therein is a mini-crisis in education these day. So much so that there are services for professors to submit their collected student papers to, and the service checks to see if it is partially or totally plagiarised and reports back to the professor. It's still hard to get a grip on. There's so much on the internet, some information true, other fanciful, and other information just patently untrue some subtly, some blatantly. We wish our students would really read the source material before cutting and pasting and thence make a judgment as to whether to quote it properly in their paper. Alas, this usually doens't happen.
If we as academics, just take a student's paper freshly handed in, and choose a randon sentence, and quote it with quote marks into google, we might see whence it was taken from. This is upsetting if not quoted properly and comprehended.
Worse than that, is personal communication which is cut and pasted from sources and left as authored by the email writer. This happens a lot. The facade of someone's knowing something. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell for sure if someone knows something, for written exams are just an approximation to knowledge and oral exams and presentations are a little more rigorous and better to tell.
But how much does our correspondent know and how much was original writing and how much was simply cut and pasted ? Hard to tell these days. Even newspaper writers and journalists have been found to be practicing this acacdemically dastardly deed of plagiarising.
So we are left scratching our heads as to who really knows something and who's faking it. Maybe even without thinking they're faking it.
There was a research project at MIT, if memory serves, called SCIgen, wherein they used a computer program and system to generate relatively random but yet paradoxically coherent academic papers to be submitted to academic journals for publication. No human intervention in writing it. It was a kind of high class gibber. But the research team was a bit surprised to find that many of these fraudulent papers were actually accepted for publication in journals ! That's very scary.
So we again are left with McLuhan's warning about the medium becoming the message and not the content of the message.
In a cut and paste world we are simply robotic and mechanical. That is so very inappropriate for us humans in the long run. We really have a gift for observation, new knowledge, and creation of new ideas. But we must use this ability or lose it.
Admittedly, the sages and holy writings warn us that "there is nothing new under the sun". Especially if time is infinite and the number of particles is finite, then the 1993 film "Groundhog Day" takes on a whole new flavour in the Nietzschean sense of the Eternal Return. So maybe there is nothing new under the sun.
But it's nice to think so and re-discover it ourselves and comprehend it.
Ah -- but for the snows of yesteryear, as Francois Villon wrote in the 15th century in his Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis. We long for the world before mechanical cutting and pasting, with comprehension out of the equation of the process.
Look, after all, this is not academic flummery. It is about everyday real life and its characteristics and pitfalls with modern technology and actually using our inherent abilities.
We can't get lost or even belive in all our yesterdays, as the Beatles sang in their beautiful 1965 song, "Yesterday", but we can make the present and future, whatever they are or were, more imbued with our signature and actions and involvement.
Perhaps we ought to act more naturally with our intellect and gifts of wisdom. Hmm. That was another Beatles song: "Act Naturally". So it is. Jung may have been right with his Synchronicity. He certainly wasn't into cutting and pasting. And the alternative "B" side of "Yesterday" was the song "I Should have Known Better". Indeed.