The article that I read and chose to respond to is the Gabriel New York Times article on plagiarism and how in this digital age the idea of plagiarism is becoming gray. I believe that people in this information rich age are brought up to believe that everything is common knowledge, and who is to say that it is not? If we want to know something, the answers are at our fingertips in an instant. 20 years ago, if a person wanted to know who held the record for most gold medals at a single Olympic games, they would have to go either to a library or find a computer if they were lucky enough to know someone with a PC and look it up. I won’t even go back 40 years and explain to process by which people looked up information then. In 2011, if I wanted to know that, all I have to do is type it into the Google search on my phon. It is that simple. Our generation has the world at our fingertips, and with that we have all the information that the world holds at our fingertips at well. So while I agree that my generation has a very small of idea of what plagiarism actually means, I believe it is due to two things: the idea that they touched on in the article that our generation does not know how to actually do research and write papers very well and that is attributed to our high school and middle school system, and also the idea that we are growing up and being taught that we can figure out anything if we don’t have the answer to it already. Our generation in my opinion is the most intellectual generation ever due to the fact that we have every bit of research ever done at our fingertips.
Mike Regan
