What is behind the Copy/Paste generation?
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 10:25 am
Those born between the 1980s and late 1990s are known by many names. Some call them "Millennials," others "Generation Y." In my case, I'm going to refer to this group as the "Copy/Paste Generation."
We started recording radio tracks on cassettes so we could listen to them at any time. Then we stopped transcribing by hand what was said in the heavy volumes of the encyclopedia and started copying excerpts from the Encarta Encyclopedia CD to finish our schoolwork faster.
Up until then we did Copy/Paste but still cited the source. However, with the advent of the Internet, everything changed and giving credit to the original source is becoming increasingly rare. Even though we all should do it, and the most absolutist of us still insist that it should be that way, how many of us actually do it all the time?
We may cite our source when writing essays for college all mobile company name list or work (as we should), but how many of us cite our source when we download a Pinterest image we like and repost it to our Facebook wall?
This is a very complex issue, especially when you see that a major media outlet downloads a photo that you took yourself and publishes it as if it were their own without citing the source, or even worse, when a journalist copies an article from your blog and reposts it under their name!
Even the acclaimed Steve Jobs was immersed in this same dilemma. Early in his career he boasted about how Apple had copied and improved Xerox's Alto (1973) to create the first Macintosh (1984), while once Apple was established it launched multi-million dollar lawsuits against all those who wanted to copy it, as Kirby Ferguson recounts in his document "Everything is a Remix".
We started recording radio tracks on cassettes so we could listen to them at any time. Then we stopped transcribing by hand what was said in the heavy volumes of the encyclopedia and started copying excerpts from the Encarta Encyclopedia CD to finish our schoolwork faster.
Up until then we did Copy/Paste but still cited the source. However, with the advent of the Internet, everything changed and giving credit to the original source is becoming increasingly rare. Even though we all should do it, and the most absolutist of us still insist that it should be that way, how many of us actually do it all the time?
We may cite our source when writing essays for college all mobile company name list or work (as we should), but how many of us cite our source when we download a Pinterest image we like and repost it to our Facebook wall?
This is a very complex issue, especially when you see that a major media outlet downloads a photo that you took yourself and publishes it as if it were their own without citing the source, or even worse, when a journalist copies an article from your blog and reposts it under their name!
Even the acclaimed Steve Jobs was immersed in this same dilemma. Early in his career he boasted about how Apple had copied and improved Xerox's Alto (1973) to create the first Macintosh (1984), while once Apple was established it launched multi-million dollar lawsuits against all those who wanted to copy it, as Kirby Ferguson recounts in his document "Everything is a Remix".