Going full-time with the paper mills was the only decision I could have made at the time.
My life changed overnight. The self-esteem that refused to show its face anywhere near the industrial cleaning supply company quietly crept back into my life. Never again would I work for somebody else’s dream. (Unless that dream was turning in a paper without having to write it.)
I was finally producing a commodity with value that couldn’t easily be outsourced to India. In fact, India’s best and brightest were outsourcing to me. And not just India’s but China’s, Korea’s, the Philippines’, Indonesia’s, Saudi Arabia’s … you name it. If you could find an Internet café in your hood, barrio, or wasti, I was at your service.
I was starting to make a little loot. Not much but just enough to buy a buggy Dell laptop. The company I worked for charged customers a rate per page that varied, depending on how tight the deadline was. I could make a bunch of money taking on “rush orders,” which were assignments due in twenty-four hours or less. And I was learning little tricks for working faster, for getting more in, for turning minutes into dollars. Really, though, it wasn’t about the little tricks, like fluffing sentences with unnecessary clauses or adding gratuitous lines summarizing previous claims. These tricks help to shave off seconds as exhaustion begins its gloaming. But really I was improving with practice, getting more efficient with each passing assignment. It was dribbling a basketball for a thousand hours and taking ten million free throws and bounce passing against a cinder block wall until these foundational elements of the game were encoded into muscle memory, until I no longer needed to be completely awake to analyze themes of insanity in Hamlet, until the creation of new intellectual property was truly nothing more than pushing buttons.
And once I reached this point, the idea of protecting my personal copyright seemed ridiculous.
Ethan and I lived the ascetic and meditative life of bachelors. Defrosted burritos for dinner, pitchers of Yuengling at Manny Brown’s for dessert, and hours upon hours spent turning blank pages into cheap intellectual property. The Internet made us brokers of knowledge based on no greater credential than the ability to create supply where we perceived demand. It was pure market science.
It wasn’t always easy to explain my job to people. It relied so heavily on technological and cultural conditions specific to the early twenty-first century that if you weren’t up to speed, it just wouldn’t even seem possible. Lord knows I tried fruitlessly to make sense of it for my grandmother.
During one of our regular visits to her apartment in South Jersey, my sisters and I brought Grandma dinner from the prepped-food aisle at the supermarket. It was just easier than cooking in her kitchen, where she’d constantly pop up, hobble over, and insist upon helping, this in spite of the fact that she hasn’t been able to open a pickle jar since Ed Sullivan last had a show on television.
I brought my laptop, my travel hard drive, and my mobile wireless card from Verizon, which allows me to access the Internet from anywhere, even 1953, which is where my grandmother’s apartment is located.
I usually queue up a list of her favorites on iTunes while we hang out: Frankie Laine, Vaughn Monroe, Perry Como. Nothing with a pulse. I don’t mind it, my sisters tolerate it, and my grandmother, who smoked cigarettes through her forties, sings along with every song. Of course, all of this is possible through the magic of the interweb.
My grandma … well, she’s a trip. Everything makes her cry, but not in a sad way. It’s what Jewish seniors call “kvelling.” She wells up, her voice rises three octaves, and she sort of quakes. She does this when she sees us on holidays. She does this when we call her to thank her for the ten-dollar checks that she sends every birthday without fail. She does this when we help her set the VCR to tape her “programs.” She loves COPS.
She’s a cool old lady. She laughs at swear words, and if you say any particular word frequently enough in a short space of time, she’s bound to accidentally say it herself. My grandmother has actually started out sentences by saying, “Fart, I mean … oh, dammit.”
She’s never thrown anything out. She still has every bottle of laundry detergent she ever bought. Her freezer is like a tour through history: “If you look to your left, you’ll notice a loaf of bread that dates back to the second Roosevelt administration. As part of the New Deal, Roosevelt brought food rationing and price controls to the market so that Grandma could purchase this bread at seven cents a loaf.”
That night I was hanging a picture for her, and I asked her for some nails. She produced a yellow cardboard box with an illustration of a little boy hammering. It was in perfect condition and at least fifty years old.
“Grandma,” I said, “these are actually the original nails. This box could be worth something.”
My grandmother has absolutely no understanding of how the Internet works, what it is, or what makes it possible. I have attempted tirelessly to explain it even though I suspect that the Internet is probably a dangerous place for somebody like my grandmother. It’s not that she’d start giving her bank account and routing numbers to every Nigerian prince or friend allegedly stranded at a PO box in Scotland. Quite to the contrary. If she received an e-mail like that, she’d call the police, move the couch in front of her door, cancel all her credit cards, and throw her computer off her balcony. The Internet is a big place, and I’m not sure she’d be comfortable there.
“So, how’s work? Are you still with the cleaning supply people?” she asked.
“Actually, I graduated from there.”
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I’m so proud of youuuuuuuu.” High-pitched wailing and sobbing.
“Yeah, and I’ve got corporate headhunters all over me, so really, anything could happen now.”
“I love you so much!”
“I love you too, Grandma.”
“And how’s your book-writing going?”
“Well, I’m not really working on a book right now.”
“What are you working on?”
“Well, I’m helping students with their homework. Remember? I told you about this.”
“So you’re tutoring the students?”
“No. Grandma. I’m helping them cheat. I write papers for them, and they pay me.”
“Ohhhh,” she said somewhat gravely. “Does that pay well?”
“It pays me well enough. Actually, it pays me better than the cleaning supply company.”
“Oh,” she said, giggling a little bit. “So how does that work? Do you go to the students, or do they come to you?”
“No. Grandma, it’s all over the Internet.” I pointed to the computer and showed her the website while I explained. “They send their assignments through the company that I work for. I write them and send them back.”
“But how do you find the students?”
“Well, they find me. I should say, they find the company that I work for, they use their credit card to pay for a paper, then the company puts the paper online, where I can look at it and decide whether to write it.”
“But how do you write their papers? You don’t do the research, do you? Where do you find everything?”
“Grandma, you have to understand, it’s very easy to find stuff on the Internet. You just type in the thing you’re looking for, a page comes up showing you all the different websites where that thing might be, and you just click on them.”
“OK.” She didn’t understand.
“OK. It’s like, imagine if you were in a library, and you wanted to find every page in every book that mentions Tony Bennett.”
She lit up at the thought of Tony Bennett. These were the first two words she’d understood in about twenty minutes.
“So imagine that you can walk into this library and type in the words ‘Tony Bennett’ and that all the books that mention him fly off the shelves and land in front of you with bookmarks for all the pages on which you can find his name.”
“Your grandfather and I met Tony Bennett when he was performing in Atlantic City. He’s very tall in person.”
Talking to my grandmother about the Internet was like going back in time and trying to explain to an Andrews Sisters fan club why people like Lady Gaga.
I knew she didn’t really understand what I meant by anything. I had tried so many times to explain it to her. I had even showed her on numerous occasions, scrolling through websites about Eddie Cantor and demonstrating how easily I could look up all of Jeanette MacDonald’s movies just like that. But she couldn’t possibly comprehend the way that facts are so accessible, the way that we communicate with one another, the speed at which information careens, replicates, disseminates, distorts, and disappears into the virtual ether, never to be googled again.
This is a cultural game-changer that makes no sense whatsoever to my grandmother. How could it? When she was in school, if she wanted to know who had invented the cotton gin, she’d just ask around until she met somebody who’d known Eli Whitney. If my parents wanted to know, they’d go to a library and do, well, god knows what. I went to libraries when I was a kid, and all I did was read Mad magazine and leaf through issues of National Geographic looking for native boobies.
Ethan and I tried to go to the library once, just once, in order to conduct research. I was looking for a book by Hunter S. Thompson. It was readily available on the Internet, and the assignment was easy enough. But it seemed like as good a reason as any to get out on a sunny day. And really, you have to get out of the house once in a while, or a job like this could turn you into a freak.
The Central Library occupies multiple city blocks, rises several stories, and descends some number of moldy levels underground. It is a hulking behemoth, impressive in its own way but also a monument to something from a long time ago.
After entering, ascending the wide marble steps, regrouping to catch our breath, emerging in the wrong section of the correct floor, receiving directions from an unsmiling lady librarian, and finally arriving at our destination, we found that the book was not in its proper spot. I logged in to the library intranet at a computer terminal and learned that the book was not checked out. I inquired with the old cardigan-wearing gentleman at the desk, who said that the book was “in the stacks.”
“I can send somebody down there. But you’ll need to have a seat.”
He called for an old lady who walked with an excruciating, disjointed, and slow gait that suggested one, maybe even two prosthetics. He sent the poor thing down to the stacks. Ethan and I sat down and agreed that book or no book, it was simply a victory if she didn’t die down there.
Thirty minutes passed, and to our relief, she returned. She had had no success locating Mr. Thompson’s text, though. I’d have to go elsewhere for my gonzo. I went home, my sunny day now more than half over, with nothing but a soft pretzel from a stand downtown to show for it. I googled the book and wrote the paper in an hour.
I haven’t a fuck’s clue how to do research if my Internet is down and my phone battery is dead.
My grandmother can’t make sense of the Internet. Me, I can’t make sense of the world without it. If it weren’t for the Internet, I would have no idea how to make a living as a writer. I paid all that money for that Writer’s Market book. I sent out a billion self-addressed stamped envelopes so that magazine editors could throw my manuscripts in the trash and reuse my postage stamps … probably. I submitted samples to the too-cool-for-you hipster papers that circulated the city for free. I got by on encouraging rejection letters and constructive critiques.
Nearly every cent I’ve ever earned as a writer was made online and not just without the help of gatekeepers but in spite of them. I suppose I can credit my college for training me thusly. Books were so goddamned expensive there that I just learned to get by on whatever I could find on the Internet. Everything is googleable.
A great wealth of knowledge is available for free to those who know how to massage a keyboard. For a master masseur and an indigent scumbag, it was a no-brainer. I could never afford books, not any good ones, anyway. I always had a copy of Shatner’s TekWar lying around.
Ironically, though, thanks to my job I was now getting awesome books, and some terrible ones, for free. Many of my clients would not only buy syllabus-required books that they had no intention of reading, but also bundle them up and FedEx them to me so I could do their coursework. Thousands of dollars’ worth of brand-new texts, many of them gorgeous hardback editions. I did a whole course on American constitutional history once for a client. This kid sent me The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Abraham Lincoln’s Great Speeches, Selected Writings by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Other Writings, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.
All of them were shrink-wrapped editions with glossy covers that make my shelves look positively stunning.
Naturally, I could find any one of those texts on the Internet for free, and I generally have. Frankly, cutting, pasting, and properly citing reference materials from websites takes a lot less time than retyping them from physical texts. Still, it’s fun to get shiny new books and put them in my personal library. It makes me look well-rounded. Most of my clients never ask for their texts back.
It’s just as well. The best of them I usually read in the bathroom, anyway. They are flagged.
Frankly, if it weren’t for the tactile pleasures of holding a text while on the toilet, I would only read on the Internet. Such is the crime of my generation. We are killing the book. The book shouldn’t take it personally, though. We are also killing the record, the newspaper, and the magazine. Someday soon, we’ll have nothing with which to swat flies.
I can see the bind that professors are in, though. Many of them make a good side piece hustling their own books in class. I had a class called Politics and Culture in my junior year of college. The summer before the class, the professor published a pet project about the spy novels of John le Carré. When we showed up in class, the required readings were five le Carré spy novels and the professor’s book analyzing them. There was a mutiny. Half the class dropped immediately. But it was so hard to get into a requisite-fulfilling class that the other half of us simply remained behind and harangued the professor deep into the semester about how any of this crap related to politics or culture.
Don’t tell me that selling books isn’t a priority for educators.
Professors and schools are gatekeepers of intellectual property, arbiters of that which is valid and that which is not. But capitalism cares nothing for their prejudices. Capitalism helps those who help themselves. Enter the paper mill.
There are a few things that people will not want to hear about the company for which I began working all the way back in college. Here they are:
• This is one of the best and most ethical companies that I have ever worked for. I won’t tell you its name. It wouldn’t matter anyway. It’s just one of many, at least hundreds and possibly thousands.
• The company never bounced a check to me, and it never paid me late. I always got paid exactly what I’d earned. It was never a question. If I was on the right side of a dispute with a customer, the company went to bat on my behalf. If I needed an advance, the company would approve it. If there was a change in company policy, it would be reported on the writers’ board in due time for writers to prepare.
• The company revamped its website format every few years, always working to improve the flow of traffic and ease of use. It remained abreast of advancing Web-design and e-commerce technologies, created a highly streamlined work flow that required very little oversight, and still engaged in regular testing and maintenance of the system.
• When customer service or employment issues came up, I rarely waited more than an hour for a response from one of the two customer service representatives to whom I was assigned. They were always friendly, polite, professional, fair, available, and appreciative.
Having been the recipient of bounced paychecks, having been verbally condescended to, having been falsely promised opportunities for advancement in past jobs, I saw the paper-writing company as one of the first trustworthy entities I’d yet met in the crooked world.
And not just with me. It was judicious and fair with its customers, too. The common impression that many of the paper-writing companies online are scams demonstrates a critical misunderstanding of how the paper-mill economy works. Some may indeed be scams, but many are simply service companies. Repeat business, good word of mouth, and consistent results are very important to success in a service industry. Therefore, it behooved my employers to run a fair, equitable, and trustworthy practice. A paper-writing company has natural enemies, and no need for conflict from other sources.
I followed this example to the best of my abilities. I used a personal honor system when dealing with customers. Revisions are a common part of the job. Writing papers is not an exact science, of course. After I’ve sent out a paper, there’s no way to know if I’ll ever hear another word on the subject. I might complete an epic masterpiece and receive a five-page diatribe detailing with bullet points and headings exactly what I did wrong. I might puke a bunch of barely related words onto a page and receive an e-mail praising my work and promising the customer’s vote if I ever run for president. Beauty is in the eye of the somewhat literate beholder. No way to know.
But when revision requests came in, I would try really hard to be fair about it. If the completed essay really hadn’t adhered to the customer’s initial instructions, I would provide the requested rewrite. And the company would expect me to do so. But it was objective about this, and so was I.
I’ve gotten lord knows how many assignments phrased like this: “In three pages, tell your life story, complete with the most embarrassing thing you ever did in a public bathroom and how it felt the first time you had an inguinal hernia examination.” The student might supplement this with additional information such as the following: “Please make this essay awesome. Thnx.”
The customer presumes that whatever deeply personal anecdote or complex set of emotions I select from the annals of his or her memory will do just fine. Some paper-writing companies will inflate the accomplishments of their independent contractors, claiming to employ staffs of Ph.D.s and retired professors. But telepathy is another skill entirely, and as far as I know, my employer never claimed I had it. Why so many customers had the impression that I could explain their internal strengths, describe their greatest fears, and rifle through their personal memories without much more than a credit card receipt, I’ll never know.
I tended to use assignments like this as an opportunity to flex my sometimes neglected creative-writing muscles. Prompted to describe a life-changing experience and how it related to my eventual career aspirations—a standard multipurpose academic essay that I’ve written at least thirty times—I might tell the story, from the perspective of the customer, of course, of the morning I woke up to find that I’d been bitten by a radioactive praying mantis and would thenceforth travel the world using my special powers to fight crime in a fluorescent green spandex bodysuit.
In the event that I got any complaints from Praying Mantis Man, my employers would probably review the initial instructions and agree that I’d been left with little choice but to improvise. Who’s to say what’s true and what’s not?
On the other hand, if I wrote this same essay in response to the question “What are the three primary causes of climate change over the continent of Antarctica?” my employers would most assuredly request that I edit the assignment with closer attention to the initial instructions. And because they were so judicious and fair, I would always defer to their mediation in such matters.
My company had a disclaimer that appeared at the top of every completed order. The basic gist of it was that the customer bore sole legal responsibility for any undue usages of the material in question; the material could be used in the individual’s own work only if proper citations were made; and it was expressly illegal to reuse, resell, or otherwise claim the work in question without proper crediting. The company would even provide the customer with a bibliography to be used in the event of citing the completed “study guide,” “research supplement,” or whatever the hell other euphemism you wanted to give it.
This was the basic legal measure taken to protect the legitimacy of the paper-writing company. Not every company takes this step, but the better ones that are likely to be around for a little while all offer a similar disclaimer. The disclaimer was, of course, not really designed to prevent the student from turning in the assignment. It was to prevent him from blaming us for whatever consequences came of this action. The disclaimer was sufficient to preemptively inform the student that we would take no responsibility for grades received for submission; that we held no accountability for punitive measures, such as probation, censure, or expulsion, resulting from the assignment; and that in such instances, if we really wanted to, we could actually sue the student for improper usage of our intellectual property.
Not that we ever would. Suing your own customers is poor business practice. Just ask the music industry.
Also, not unlike in the music industry, one offshoot of this arrangement was that the customer didn’t have a whole lot of recourse for buying a crappy product. If you buy a Michael Bolton record and then walk around complaining to everybody about how bad it is, you’re really just incriminating yourself.
Like many companies, some paper mills simply sell a shitty product. It is incumbent upon the buyer to make informed decisions, as one would when choosing a car or a laptop or a doctor. Referrals are a pretty big part of the business for the company of quality.
The company I worked for was successful and strategic and perfectly poised to enjoy the realities of intellectual property law and globalization and that magical series of tubes2 known as the Internet. And thus, I and my fortunes as a writer were bound to these tubes, which suspended the limitations of time and space, which sent my writing over lakes, rivers, and oceans, which erased the once impenetrable imaginary borders between countries but did little to erase the language barriers, which in fact created one vast virtual Babel where you could also find great deals on flights.
The Web was a place so unlike school in its versatility, its accessibility, and its mystery. My classes had been rigid and often dedicated to the assertion of one perspective. But here, where no gatekeepers existed, I was free to use and create intellectual property in a way that school had never ventured to teach me.
That’s because the fundamental role of the professor has changed very little since the time when my parents went to school, or even since the time when my grandmother went to school. Our relationship to information is in a state of constant evolution, and our relationship to our professors remains stuck in a hundred-year holding pattern. Even through the occasional scrutiny and reform of pedagogy, the professor remains the single great channel for knowledge, the funnel through which years of singular education are condensed into ideas conveniently framed by a textbook and a semester of lectures.
Unfortunately, students have other ideas altogether about acquiring information. They find it themselves, they make it themselves, and they share it with each other.
In November 2010, a professor of strategic management at Central Florida University (CFU) made national headlines by using the widespread cheating in his course to create a teachable moment. A recording of Richard Quinn’s lecture, which has been widely viewed thanks to YouTube, shows an emotional professor reporting to a lecture hall of nearly six hundred students that he possesses “forensic evidence” demonstrating that roughly one-third of those who took the midterm exam cheated by studying an answer key from a publisher’s test bank that circulated among the students. Quinn criticizes his students in harsh terms for violating the university’s honor code and his personal standards of integrity. He proclaims in the lecture that “the days of being able to find a new way to cheat the system are over. They’re over.”
Cheating is everywhere, of course. The CFU numbers aren’t so surprising, really. But Quinn’s lecture also shows a critical misunderstanding of the conditions that have led to so much cheating, both in his classroom and in others like it around the country. In fairness to Professor Quinn, schools are capable of far more insidious things than failing to inspire their students. But if you’re trying to improve young minds, that’s still a pretty serious shortcoming.
CFU’s investigation of the event went on to highlight, among other things, how professors and students think differently about information sharing. Quinn’s highly personalized diatribe demonstrates his own understandable frustrations, but he doesn’t say much about what all this cheating really means. According to a 2010 article published by the website Inside Higher Ed, “the perception of exactly what happened leading up to the midterm has become a point of contention. What is clear is that some students gained access to a bank of tests that was maintained by the publisher of the textbook that Quinn used. They distributed the test to hundreds of their fellow students, some of whom say they thought they were receiving a study guide like any other—not a copy of the actual test.”
Not only is cheating everywhere, but the current generation also has a different view of what constitutes it. This is essential to understanding the CFU story. But here’s something else to consider: In a six-hundred-person course, and with a school-supplied course textbook, how much opportunity did Quinn really have to design an exam that worked for the needs and goals of his students? This is an issue not just of educational laziness, but of a failure to understand just how accessible information has become. I don’t know Quinn personally and I can’t speak to his philosophy as a professor, but his behavior in this instance is symbolic of a kind of educator. For our purposes, we will call this educator Dr. Microfiche. Just as the CFU students could not hide their reliance on the modern sharing of information, neither can Dr. Microfiche hide his ignorance. The hope is that incidences such as this might elucidate the error in his way of thinking. He is no longer a gatekeeper of information as he once was.
But one wonders if Dr. Microfiche truly understands the implications of what occurred in Professor Quinn’s course. What are his thoughts on the fact that two hundred cheaters in his class of six hundred presumably felt that they could benefit more by passing the class than by learning from it? It seems fair to assert that Quinn and his university sowed the seeds for this type of blatant disregard for the honor system by failing to create “a community devoted to learning.”3 When at least one-third of all students are proven offenders, it is the environment and not the individual that must explain itself.
Educators are at war with the Internet, whether they know it or not. Traditional educators are at war with the Internet even as they use it, embrace it, and channel their work through it. The Web doesn’t just open the door to clever ways of undermining the research process. It isn’t just a context in which the student is more comfortable than the professor. It is a capitalist free-for-all where the student has learned to be wholly independent, for better or worse.
The Internet is, as my friend Donovan Root phrases it, putting an end to the “monopoly on knowledge.” Donovan spent the ten years following graduation working in the finance industry and offering eerily accurate prophecies about the coming economic apocalypse.
Donovan’s position of prestige in the world of finance was achieved on the strength of his burning intelligence and an otherworldly geekiness where the computer is concerned. We’re the exact same age, but when I was in junior high, I spent my weekends setting fire to things and frantically putting them out for entertainment. Donovan was building computers from scratch and creating Web bulletin boards, then going outside to set things on fire. This was in 1992. Back in the days of the dot-com boom, Donovan was one of the Internet wunderkinds, a computer nerd version of Doogie Howser, the kind of kid rich adults threw money at with hopes of striking it even richer.
Donovan has been a witness to the great revolution from the inside. He explains to me that in his world of finance, as in the world of professorship and in the professional world in general, the exclusivity of knowledge has long served to validate the expert and his earning power. Before the Internet, finding information, building it into knowledge, and knowing how to learn and how to profit from it were all considered to be part of a special skill set. It would take a doctor to interpret the results of a blood test. It would take a stockbroker to tell you how your investments were doing. It would take a lion tamer to show you how to use a whip.
The Wikipedia entry on lion taming offers a brief definition but then links to the websites of more than a dozen of the world’s most famous or successful lion tamers. There are tutorials for how to become a lion tamer on eHow and HowStuffWorks. I also watched a horrible video on YouTube in which a Ukrainian lion tamer is mauled by several angry lions, which led me, inevitably, to a series of articles detailing how Roy of Siegfried and Roy was dissected by a white tiger with a lot of pent-up aggression. Ultimately, I was dissuaded from becoming a lion tamer, but assured that I could do it if I wanted to.
Frankly, there’s a lot I can do now without paying tuition, kowtowing to a professor, or sweating grades. The Internet has knocked over the ivory tower, and all its precious papers are fluttering in the wind. The cherished notion that knowledge may be obtained only by those with the time, the dedication, the inquisitiveness, and, yes, the financial means is no more. Whatever it costs to go online in your region, that’s how much it costs to learn.
It is human to absorb, integrate, and recontextualize. And today, it is expedient to do so. As I have sold off my alleged intellectual property to be claimed by others, I have become rich in knowledge, stamina, and patience, and without anybody’s help.
The powerful discretion of the ivory tower is not what it once was. No wonder academia hates Wikipedia so much. Collective knowledge is a threat to those whose jobs are based on singular knowledge. Students can get what universities are pitching for free. Donovan calls this the “disintermediation of the expert.”
The things that we used to need professors for, we can get on our own.
In the era of deregulation, of trade liberalization, of globalization, in an era when jobs are less about specialization and more about cost-effective commoditization, the deconstruction of claims to intellectual property is as easy as the deconstruction of international barriers. They’re all just ideas, anyway, all social constructs subject to change depending on how you were raised, the nature of your economy, and the ways in which you stand to benefit or be exploited.
Globalization and intellectual property are strange bedfellows.
On the subject of intellectual property, my friend Paulie always liked to quote Ecclesiastes 1:9—not that I would describe Paulie as assertively religious. He would say,
What has been will be again,
What has been done will be done again;
There is nothing new under the sun.
Paulie was an accountant with ten years’ experience at one of the Big Four firms. The gig wore him out. When the ax fell on him, it seemed like it was more a relief than anything else. Paulie was one of the most gloriously reckless partyers I’ve ever met. He was routinely the guy denied entrance into a bar, booted from a strip joint, or asked never to return to a casino. He has always been welcomed in my house.
A master of disguise, a Tasmanian devil in a mustache, and a Falstaffian character whose abandon struck fear in the hearts of more conservative men, he reminded me often that we have precious little control over our own ideas. To wit, Paulie had a tremendous wealth of intellectual property that he would dispense with seemingly little concern for context, audience, or pertinence. He was great company for a spirited or spirituous exercise in rhetorical combat. He was frequently correct but possibly crazy.
In conversation we have both wondered if such a thing as intellectual property even exists anymore.
We’re living in a time of mashups, of sampling, of co-opting, of file sharing. We borrow liberally until information and intellectual property are nothing but bits of quotable human ephemera, connected only loosely to their original contexts or creators.
Ray Charles knew nothing of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” when he sang “I Got a Woman.” And I’m pretty certain that the Southern Tones didn’t know that their song “It Must Be Jesus” would be adapted (by Charles) into an R&B chart topper about a man-pleasuring sugar mama way across town.
Online piracy, Wikipedia, social networking, and the supposed “knowledge economy” may not be simply new ways of looking at the intellectual property hierarchy; rather, they may be the tools of its destruction.
Historically, selling ideas has not just been a way of profiting from them—it has also served to enforce ideological class division: The person with the idea has something, and if you want it, you need to pay him.
The way Ethan and I viewed it, the Internet and paper writing had given us the chance to create intellectual property of economic value without anybody’s approval. Suddenly, for those without expensive credentials, for those possessing only the ability to generate intellectual property at will, the market had produced a great new opportunity.
And evidence suggests that even if my grandmother and Dr. Microfiche do ever come to truly understand the cultural implications of the Internet, they may be surprised to find out that their generations have been disintermediated.
There is indeed a generational divide where the Internet is concerned. But it has less to do with who uses the Internet than with how we are using it. It is deceiving to note that Americans over the age of seventy are the fastest-growing demographic of Web users.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that just 26 percent of Americans between the ages of seventy and seventy-five were online in 2005. As of 2009, that number stood at 45 percent. But the difficulty we’re experiencing in harnessing the Internet for the purposes of education is not about access or interest or the fact that your great-aunt Sally knows how to attach photographs to e-mails.
Rather, we’re experiencing a paradigm shift in the cultural treatment of intellectual property, and this shift is a direct consequence of how our generations variously use the Web. Sixteen percent of sixty-four- to seventy-two-year-olds download music online; 21 percent of baby boomers (forty-five to sixty-three) do it. For teens, the number is 59 percent; for Gen Yers, 58 percent; and for Gen Xers, 46 percent.
Similar trends emerge in the areas of social networking and blogging. Sixteen percent of baby boomers ages forty-five to fifty-four have created social networking profiles for themselves. Nine percent in the age group of fifty-five to sixty-three have done so. By contrast, 29 percent of thirty-three-to forty-four-year-olds, 60 percent of eighteen-to twenty-three-year-olds, and 55 percent of twelve-to seventeen-year-olds have created social networking profiles. Twenty-eight percent and 20 percent of twelve-to seventeen-and eighteen-to thirty-two-year-olds respectively have created their own blogs, whereas 10 percent of thirty-three-to forty-four-year-olds, 6 percent of forty-five-to fifty-four-year-olds, and 7 percent of fifty-five-to sixty-three-year-olds have done so.
So as much as the older generations are using their e-mail accounts and buying M*A*S*H collectibles on eBay, younger users are overwhelmingly contributing to the creation and replication of intellectual property online. And because the Web has become so dominant a force in so many facets of our personal, professional, and educational lives, these patterns suggest a disruption in mankind’s long legacy of inherently ageist hierarchical intellectual property gatekeeping.
The ways in which we use the Web for expression and the gathering of information have become inherently more communal, more collective, less accredited, and less consistent with the ways in which older generations have formed cultural bodies of knowledge. Democracy—with all of its wanton, inarticulate, and garbled constituencies—has seized our technology.
Oh, the informality of it all!
Students learn in a way for which many older professors have no frame of reference. Where Dr. Microfiche is concerned, Professor Quinn’s students are cheaters and beneath contempt. Where these students are likely concerned, Dr. Microfiche has no concept of the way his role as a professor should have evolved. The information-sharing tactics that Professor Quinn’s students employed to “cheat” on their exam are consistent with those they will employ in their future professions and in their pursuit of information in general. That any professor might refuse to accept a role in helping them to do this would be ignorant at best and sociologically regressive at worst.
I can’t tell you that the Internet is a trustworthy place. I can’t tell you that what intellectual property you’ll find there was created fairly and ethically. I can’t even tell you that simply using the Internet won’t make you a victim of identity theft. However, I would argue that there’s not a whole lot that anybody can do to change any of that now.
Professors are not police officers, and it is not their responsibility to make the Internet safe, or to protect students from the enormous wealth of garbage out there, or to protect themselves from it. But if it is the professors’ responsibility to help students learn, then every classroom should be equipped with the knowledge and will to help students navigate the evolving virtual space. To date, our educational imagination extends to the ideas of distance education, virtual classrooms, and digitized library catalogs.
The illusion of progress.
These are things that make schools more profitable and make cheating easier but do nothing to enrich the learning process as a function of Web use. The professor, the primary text, and the formal research process remain the main channels through which education is conveyed, and with even less personal attention.
As dinosaurs like Dr. Microfiche slowly go extinct from the profession, it will be incumbent upon the future leaders of higher education to evolve. They should not be gatekeepers or cops or censors but navigators. Professors want to be needed, and for the money we’re spending on school, we’d like to need them. The Internet is a pretty scary place, busting at the seams with neo-Nazi militias, cannibal cookbooks, and American Idol fan sites. Don’t tell us not to look at this stuff. Teach us how to use it. Teach us how to use Facebook responsibly, how to differentiate between sharing and stealing, how to engage openly in a discussion about the blurring of lines between these two acts. Don’t tell us not to use Wikipedia. We’re going to do it anyway. Show us how to read it, how to verify its claims, how to spot and debunk its errors, even how to correct it and contribute to its improvement.
These things that we perceive as opportunities, schools have treated as threats. If schools had seized these opportunities proactively, perhaps it would have been more difficult for me to exploit them. I never used a professor’s intelligence for help in doing the homework assignment for his class—I replaced him with the Internet. And my customers chose my help (that of some anonymous Internet person) over that of their professors. How they came to that decision is up for discussion.
But I presume that at least one factor is that my grandmother and Dr. Microfiche aren’t alone out there in their virtual disorientation.
After dinner and a game of Scattergories, my sisters and I left my grandmother’s house. I returned home to find Ethan working through an astronomy paper, with Beavis and Butt-Head on in the background. Ethan was clever when it came to the cosmos.
He passed me a pipe as I sat down and pulled my laptop from my bag. I opened it, logged on to the wireless network we’d been “borrowing” from one of our neighbors, and popped open the instructions for my current assignment.
“Asshole,” I muttered under my breath as I read them.
“No, dude. This professor. Get a load of these instructions: ‘Write four-to-five-page explanatory paper that defines a concept or issue for your reader. Need clear and concise thesis statement. Have two outside sources to help define the topic and support assertions. Have two outside sources. NO online sources for this paper. Need copy of resources.’ ”
The student offered her own addendum to the set of instructions, which I also read aloud for Ethan’s amusement. “ ‘Let me know what will the paper going to be about, also dont write about, abortion, euthanasia, clothing or death penalty, yhose were not allowed by my teacher. TTYL.’ ”
For those who don’t communicate in Instant Messaging, that last part means “Talk to you later,” like I was one of her girlfriends and we had just made plans to get our nails done tomorrow.
I could forgive that, though. Hell, I probably could have used a manicure.
What I could not forgive was an educator, in this day and age, within the context of an institution of higher learning, denying the evolution of research, defying the logic that was apparent to the student, and preparing the student for a future of conducting research in 1912. “NO online sources,” said the professor.
“No online sources, eh?” Ethan observed.
“Yeah,” I said. “So what do you suppose is the point of this research exercise? To learn the Dewey decimal system?”
“Maybe it’s to justify the grant money for the university’s recent library renovations?”
“Maybe this professor hopes to restore the card catalog to its former glory?”
“Yeah, what the fuck is his beef with the Internet? I mean, besides all the misinformation, hearsay, libel, vitriol, and fringe lunacy?”
“Well,” I ventured, “I’d say this professor is one hundred seventy-eight years old and thinks the Internet is some type of support undergarment.”
Thinking back now, though, I’m sure that wasn’t it at all. This professor knew exactly what the Internet was. The Internet was this big, terrifying, spinning vortex that would someday soon swallow him up and swallow up all of his kind. It would swallow up the hierarchy of intellectual property, leaving behind a significant opportunity for the entrepreneurially spirited.
Our little paper-writing company on South Street was a product of pure market science.