If you are angry with plagiarism, read this

This is not another piece on plagiarism. Just that plagiarism is all around us and we have failed to notice it. In the internet era, the commoditisation of content has made creativity vulnerable and generic. You can aggregate creative writing by linking content from other websites, even providing an intro from original content. As long as everyone gets eyeballs, page views and unique visitors, nobody is bothered.
Social media has enough chunks of regurgitated content passing off as individual thought. You can pick and choose Einstein and pass it off as your own. Since social media is seen as a just-born community that is anyway supposed to observe liberal rules of liberal space, intellectual property rights do not deserve a poke. But if social media is a content creator, shouldn't the rules of creativity--please don't copy--apply to it as well.
Now take another chunk of neo-liberal space called SMS. You can repurpose, forward, mutilate content any which way you can. You can always argue that such content need not be subject to scrutiny. So, what if a piece of witticism that does not belong to you, is circulated around? After all, SMS is a mode of communication that respects no barriers or values.
Now, take the search engines trawling content in cyberspace. They have led to the uber-commoditisation of content. You can pick content from anywhere, contextualise it as you want, repurpose it from top to bottom, and project the final product as your own delightful effort. Just imagine: In the olden days, you were your own search engine. You were expected to read enough on a subject to be qualified to even write a 1,000-word essay on it--and you had to remember the quotes, the writers and the contexts. Now, thanks to search engines, you can read extracts and presume you have read the books. You can, then, use these extracts to build an essay or treatise. Context be damned!
Unfortunately, education has got sucked into commoditisation. When kids use search engines to complete their school projects, they have no idea about the rights and wrongs associated with such homework. Just imagine a school project about Mars: Kids have been asked by their teachers to look at Life on Mars. Very few of them understand attribution of authorship, fact-checks, authenticity of content sources, and other forms of due diligence. Interestingly, very few classrooms treat thought/idea/content as property. In a climate where content and access are synonymous, why should creativity be seen as original and, therefore, inaccessible?
True. Content should be accessible and fungible in the assembly-line world of learning. In the social media of thought, which the internet is morphing into, ideas cannot be insular. Interactivity triggers slicing and splicing of ideas. Immortality is a function of morphing. The more an idea morphs, the longer it survives. The idea itself is a source code that sprouts other sub-ideas and sub-thoughts. Originality creates multiplicity in an interconnected world; more the number of people that work on an idea, more the innovations that flow from it. Therefore, if you insulate the source, you curb its influence. You stifle innovation. In essence, commodification of content can actually drive innovation.
There is also a purification theory. Put simply, it says the internet is the best judge of content filching. If the network feels an idea has been abused or plagiarised, the perpetrators of such thought crimes will surely be blasphemed. But, then, the internet has its own laws. It may allow sourcing, slicing and splicing as long as it fosters innovation and betters the original idea.
Art is either plagiarism or revolution, said Paul Gauguin. Seen in today's context, it would mean: If you dare break the mold, you would come up with an idea. If you are scared to break the mold, you may have to seek refuge in plagiarism. And those that break the mold are not scared to open their ideas to versioning.
This is not a defence of plagiarism. Nor is it an outcome of plagiarism fatigue. Rather, it is a reflection of our own fears and weaknesses. We seem to be ill-equipped to version, or better, an idea because we know so little of it. It's this crucial ignorance that will blaspheme us in both brick-and-mortal and internet worlds. It is a knowledge deficit.