Plagiarism and Laugh Tracks

"Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age", by Trip Gabriel, addresses the increasingly prominent issue of plagiarism that seems to be second nature to most students today. There's no nice way to express my feelings about plagiarism, so instead I'll just make a list where I do it meanly.

1. It's impossible to get through a grade school education (esp. one geared toward higher education) without learning about plagiarism. Students say they didn't know any better? I say, "BULLSHIT." (Bolded and in caps!) We have all heard the spiel from teachers for years. Years, I tell you.

2. You didn't write that stuff. You didn't go out and do hours of painstaking research. You didn't assemble it in a coherent and scholarly manner. So don't claim that you did! It's so obvious when students take credit for things that they didn't do. And professionals? How dare you.

3. If you're not willing to credit the author, then as Sarah Wilensky stated in the article, this "fosters laziness". There's no getting around it. If you're not willing to put in the effort to give credit where it's due, then your work is probably not worth reading.

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And now for something completely different.1

Oh, Chuck Klosterman. You silly, silly man. In his passage entitled "'Ha ha,' he said. 'Ha ha.'", Klosterman describes just how much he despises laugh tracks. I suppose he brings up a lot of good points that I might have at one point thought, but that I've never voiced.

Laugh tracks encourage people to laugh at certain points in television shows. It's basically "canned laughter" (and indeed, he calls it this). Is this due to the insecurity that Americans feel while they're watching television, like they might not "get" whatever it is that should be "gotten"? On the surface, it appears to make TV shows' jokes funnier... but for someone who's actually stopped to consider the nature of laugh tracks, they're insulting and just outright idiotic. Klosterman mentions having gone to Germany for four months, and how awkward it was for him to fake-laugh in conversations. This directly reflects our American attitude toward linguistics; we can't stand silence, and the laughter serves as a sort-of reinforcement for our insecurities. We've effectively been conditioned to laugh even when we don't mean it.

In my opinion, this is definitely a piece with which I can agree. Maybe the more "sophisticated" and "intelligent" TV shows don't use laugh tracks, but they succeed in a plethora of ways: for one, they leave comedy open to interpretation, which is fantastic. Additionally, the subtlety of the humor in shows is increased, which can give a gratifying sensation to people who pick up on it. (And come on, admit it. We all like feeling a bit superior sometimes.)

1 You have to have seen something like this before. If not... for shame.

To the blog cave!

Right hurr, I'm going to talk about the topic that I'm considering for my research paper. (I'm really bad at making decisions, so bear with me.)

We're all familiar, in varying degrees, with the Internet. It's a technological phenomenon that has positively exploded over the last 15-20 years. In many ways, it has become its own subculture; and within that subculture exists a myriad of sub-subcultures and interest groups. Some of them include:

• Deviant Artists (LiveJournal communities, fanfiction/slashers, oekaki frequenters)
• Forum-Based Opinionators (redditors, 4chan)
• Social Networking Moguls (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter)
• Identity Crises (MMORPG, FPS, RPing)
• Entertainment Seekers (YouTube, webseries, Newgrounds)

The number of people who participate in each of these groups numbers in the millions. Not only is it a significant amount of the population, but people who don't take the time to really examine these groups as their own subcultures can miss out on a bigger picture of which they were not aware. Go on-- name an anthropologist or a sociologist who's studying Internet subcultures. I can't think of any, and I've been around the Internet since Neopets first launched. (In a few years, this is really going to date me.)

We have an untapped resource of sociological and anthropological studies available to us, and we don't have to look any further than our computers. I don't advocate laziness, but research for research's sake could take us deeper into understanding humans not only in groups, but hiding behind the mask of anonymity in those groups.

Here are my questions for the world:

1. What does this mask of anonymity give to the people of the Internet?
2. How have these subcultures progressed over time?
3. Is there any good to come out of identifying the Internet's social groups?
4. Is this really a culture at all?
5. What negative effects has the stratification of people on the Internet had in contemporary society?

As I think of more, I'll post them. If you have any suggestions, I welcome them!

#2 - Annotated Source

Kant, Immanuel. "What is Orientation in Thinking?" Kant: Political Writings. Ed. H.S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 237-249. Print.

Immanuel Kant writes, in one of his lesser-known essays, of his worry that the integrity of knowledge and science is diminishing. This essay was written in 1786, and he predicted (well ahead of his years) that the focus of both of these fields would turn from empirical inquiry and rationality to one of a more romanticized interest. Kant rued the idea of great men driven by their feelings rather than by logic or empirical evidence.

This article is a blessed anchor amidst a drifting fleet of illogical philosophical ideas. Kant cannot be denied as one of the greatest minds of all time, and indeed, he demonstrates this in What is Orientation in Thinking? He is notorious for denying the validity of irrational thought, and so it is unsurprising for him to have been apprehensive about the romantic future in philosophy. In such a way, he is biased to write this essay.

An Haiku.

English class debate

Technology dependence

Internet goes down.