Johnson-Eiola and Selber make a lot of interesting arguments in this paper, and although not all of them are entirely clear to me, a lot of them I understand. The really interesting part that I can really relate with because I feel this way all the time is when a student or person is writing a paper and has to throw a lot of quotes in from different sources to get their meanings across. This always made me feel as though almost half the paper was not even my doing, more of a copy and paste sort of essay I find that very interesting, because, legally that is the right way to do it, but it still almost feels as though I am still stealing those peoples work and using it for my gain even though I do give them credit. It’s just weird to think that it is the universally the accepted way to do it even though to me it feels no different than blatantly plagiarizing someones work.
The way that the two authors describe assemblage is almost the same as we have been discussing what remixes are in class. An assemblage as they put it is a bunch of different sources or bits of text that are already pre existing and putting them into one new product, essentially a remix. The only difference with a remix being that it may not always be all pre existing things, it may have something original thrown in with something that has already been done before.
The argument that they make is that since nothing is original then really everything is plagiarized. To me there are two types, blatant plagiarism, then there are remixes and assemblages. Blatant plagiarism to me is just a little cheeky, I feel as though that is the only difference. I don’t understand why remixes and other things are considered acceptable when in actuality they do almost the same thing, just behind a loophole in the system. Copying is copying in my book, but since it seems as though no one this day and age can do anything that is purely an original thought, then maybe copying has to start becoming more accepted as whole.
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