[Paleopsych] Re: Rise of the Plagiosphere

[G. Reinhart-Waller]

Steve Hovland writes:
/
>>Some universities are encouraging students to precheck their papers and 
drafts against the emerging plagiosphere. Perhaps publications will soon 
routinely screen submissions. The problem here is that while such rigorous 
and robust policing will no doubt reduce cheating, it may also give writers 
a sense of futility. The concept of the biosphere exposed our environmental 
fragility; the emergence of the plagiosphere perhaps represents our textual 
impasse. Copernicus may have deprived us of our centrality in the cosmos, 
and Darwin of our uniqueness in the biosphere, but at least they left us 
the illusion of the originality of our words. Soon that, too, will be gone.>>

/
What you identify as a sense of futility should definitely be felt by those scholars who follow the flow and run the risk of being ID'd as plagiarists.  However, there are a few of us who have chosen to take the road less traveled by.  Up to now our ideas have been pooh-poohed by the mainstream but I sense a new world awakening that will be filled with the originality of our thoughts, even if only an illusion.

Regards,
Gerry Reinhart-Waller
Independent Scholar
author of:
*  Alekseev Manuscript: an archaeology of the former Soviet Union
*  Pharaoh is Dead:  formation of the predynastic state in Egypt
forthcoming:
*  Collapse of California:  social and economic decay of the Golden State