Page 100 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

WHO OWNS THE WORDS? 67

Over the last few years, writing faculty have become particu-
larly sensitive to the kinds of ownership issues that arise when stu-
dent writers create texts, especially the potential for plagiarism.
There are other issues, too, such as intellectual property concerns,
collaboration decisions, and right of use. These ownership issues
only intensify when a student enters networked writing spaces.
Compositionists should realize that the Internet is a public venue
made for direct publication of e-texts, analogous to a vanity press;
once uploaded, a student writer's web site or course paper can be
viewed (and downloaded) by an infinite number of interested read-
ers unless some password-protection system is implemented. Inap-
propriate sharing of material—from downloading an entire paper
to copying and pasting a jpeg image onto a web site—is merely a
point and click act. Whereas some appropriations are clearly con-
sidered wrong, such as the direct downloading of another's paper,
other "borrowings" are not as vilified. Photos, lyrics, music, back-
grounds, and the like are often used in building student web sites,
but these items are not attributed to the developer nor are copy-
rights secured. Many times, the common student—and sometimes
faculty—(mis)perception is that no one really owns the words, im-
ages, or sounds in internetworked spaces. Therefore, appropriation
as a way of building resources is acceptable. This notion arises
sometimes from what Geoffrey Nunberg described as the
"personalism" of the Internet as opposed to the distancing mecha-
nisms of traditional media, including books:

People speak, not as authors to an anonymous public, but rather in the
form of a colloquial conversation between participants who are
copresent in the act of speaking. Contributors often address one an-
other directly, where antagonists always refer to each other in the third
person. And the style of argument [on the Internet] admits the per-
sonal, the anecdotal, the subjective. If you are willing to make allow-
ances (rather a lot of them), the tone recalls the early
eighteenth-century periodicals and the first stirrings of the modern
critical spirit. (Nunberg, 1996, p. 32, brackets mine)

What Nunberg spoke of runs counter to the mores of contempo-
rary North American academic and professional culture, which is
generally antagonistic in its argument structure and depends on cita-
tion as acknowledgment of others' ideas. What one may consider