Technology – Page 2 – Montessori Muddle

How to Cite a Tweet

Last Name, First Name. (User Name). “Entire text of tweet (don’t change the CapitalizatioN)”, Date, Time. Tweet.

It’s essential to give credit where it’s due, especially in academic papers, but it’s good practice anywhere, anytime, and with anything. Thus the MLA has come up with a standard format for citing Tweets.

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

— Modern Language Association (MLA), 2012: How do I cite a tweet?

(via Madrigal, 2012: How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?)

The Difference Between Plagiarism and Repurposing

There’s not much of a difference between what’s being called repurposing as opposed to plagiarism, at least as far as I can tell. Andrew Sullivan excerpts from an essay to highlight Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Uncreative Writing” class where:

… students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness. …

After a semester of my forcibly suppressing a student’s “creativity” by making her plagiarize and transcribe, she will tell me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being “creative,” she had produced the most creative body of work in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity—the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training—she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.

The essence of Goldsmith’s article, however, is that creativity, these days is more built upon the work of others than ever before. No longer does the picture of a lonely, isolated artist, creating truly original work, seem to fit. Creativity these days is much more often found (and rewarded) in people who are rearranging, reimagining, and repurposing the work of others. It’s the “unoriginal genius”.

Cyberwar

Perhaps it’s cultural conditioning, or maybe it’s genetic a predisposition, but adolescent boys to seem to have more of a predilection for war games than their female peers. The games they like tend to be first-person-shooters, like Call of Duty, and, given the trends toward improved video game graphics and remote, kinetic military action, real and simulated life seem to be converging.

Recently however, the Stuxnet virus exposed a much less glamorous picture of the future of cyber warfare. Kim Zetter has an excellent, extensive article in Wired on the computer scientists and engineers who reverse engineered the virus to try to figure out who made it and what it did. Since the virus seems to have been aimed at damaging Iran’s nuclear enrichment plants their work brought them to the edge of the world of international espionage. And they still don’t really know who created this remarkably sophisticated virus, though they suspect the U.S. and Israel.

One of the most interesting take-home messages from Zetter’s article is the amazing degree of international collaboration it took to figure things out. The virus was discovered by someone in Belarus. Researchers from the anti-virus company Symantec’s offices in California, Tokyo and Paris worked together passing information from one office to the next to keep the project going 24 hours a day. They published their findings to share them, and when they ran into stumbling blocks they couldn’t solve they put out calls for help on the internet – and people responded, bringing in expertise from Germany and the Netherlands.

The virus’ secretive creators and the open, diverse collaborators who untangled the virus reflect two conflicting aspects of the future that computer technology and the internet are making possible. And this conflict is showing up more and more in different areas – take Wikileaks for example – so it will be very interesting to see where the future takes us. Of course, we are not simply flotsam on the tides of history. As citizens of the internet, we have been enabled. We have a certain power, and a concomitant responsibility, to shape what we have for the benefit of our fellow citizens and those that come after us.

Update