Googling can be another word for plagiarisng

The article below appears this week in the Irish regional newspapers of Independent Newspapers.

A person who has a twitter address tweets. Anyone who uses email sends and receives electronic mail. If you have broadband it means you can stream quite easily. People are uploading and downloading. Websites are part of everyday reality. You can choose your own server and can also have a domain name. Skyping is a great way to make cheap phone calls. And then everyone is googling. The world is full of googlers. I nearly forgot to mention apps.

Have I excluded anything? I hope not. Never mentioned iPhones and iPads. What about virtual reality? And then there is a matter of how many dpis in the jpg.

Modern jargon, buzzwords and cutting edge technology. What do you think?

Earlier this year a young German woman was awarded a prestigious prize for a book that she wrote. It transpired that she turned on her computer, maybe even or Iphone and “researched” much of the material. What she really did was plagiarised or in more understandable terms, copied or “cogged” much of the material she later presented as her own original thought.

When she was confronted on the issue, her simple reply was that that’s the way of the world today and that her work represented a new genre in modern literature. Anyone who sits down in front of a blank page or screen and has the discipline to write thousands of words deserves praise and respect.

Some weeks ago I picked up a recently published book.

I’m sure the author is widely read and is familiar with literature from the medieval period, the classics, theology, philosophy, Anglo-Irish and modern Irish literature. Somehow or other I find it hard to get my head around the idea that anyone could have such a wide and universal appreciation of literature.

The book, sorry, almost every page, had references to Goethe, Joyce, Kipling Thomas Aquinas, Socrates, Aristotle, biblical tags, St Francis de Sales, Scott Fitzgerald, Madeline L’Engle, TS Eliot. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Just two more, WB Yeats and Kathleen Morris.

I became enraged reading it and threw it on the floor. Why? Is it possible that the author could be at home with all these authors – and there were many more – that he had the facility to dip into their thought and use it as back-up in explaining his argument? Pace Goldsmith’s village schoolmaster, wondered “that one small head could carry all he knew”. (OK, I admit it, I googled that, but just to check that I had it right).

Or is it that it was an exercise in internet searches? Because you can google anything. It really is as simple as that.

Some weeks before I read the book I heard someone say that she constantly tweets, skypes, emails and texts. And then came, what for me was the bombshell, she said that when she could not think up something to say, she would download material from other people and then tweet it, email it, send it via SMS and maybe even skype it.

Back in the 1960s UK computer firm, ICT, built a large building near Dublin’s Harcourt Street to house their new computer. I remember being shown around it and really could not take in what it was all about. I just knew that the computer people, who worked and managed it, were very clever. Yet the machine, which filled that room had probably less capacity than the smallest modern laptop. Of course it is truly extraordinary.

When I was in my 20s I messed about with telephones and while living in Rome helped install a crossbar telephone exchange with automatic dial-up telephones in individual rooms. It was all mechanical stuff that required wire strippers, a soldering iron, screwdrivers and hammers too to assemble.

Today I can hardly turn on an iPhone never mind download apps. These days 12 and 14-year-olds do all that sort of stuff with amazing ease.

I’m always asking myself who are the geniuses who develop, design and implement this amazing technological hardware and software too.

Is it that we should all take it for granted and just simply use it? Of course there is no going back. That’s clear. But I have to say I for one am nervous about how googling can make plagiarising or simple copying respectable.

Modern technology has given us extraordinary possibilities. It is changing the face of the earth. And yet there are one billion people without enough food to eat today and we in the West are in one hell of an economic mess.

Not a word of this googled but I did read it to a friend who told me that Brendan Behan described reality as an illusion caused by the absence of alcohol. So what’s virtual reality?

And the reality is I am emailing this column to the editor.

Interesting how someone who uses twitter is not a twit.