#youtube is a blight & yet i cannot eat dinner in silence okay i'll die

[girderednerve]

okay i am an old man at heart & am quickly tired out by videos but i am also a total sucker for participating in the cultural moment when it seems that there is one, so i have now watched about three hours of the hb*mberguy video about plagiarism. it's very annoying, actually, probably because i am an old man & none of the discussion of it i have seen shares my preoccupations & concerns

the problem i am having, & i acknowledge that this is perhaps resolved in the last hour of this four-hour-long youtube extravaganza, is that our intrepid investigator (he's very good at videos! not meant dismissively) declines to like, actually define plagiarism or look into what citation norms are or how they differ in different contexts. the proposed referents are journalists & academics, which is really funny to me because there are regular vicious arguments in both of these communities about what proper credit looks like & what it's meant to do, and both of these fields have been around as pretty established things for a few hundred years now (you could argue this point, especially regarding when precisely academia or journalism became recognizably modern). there have been a reasonable number of pretty high-profile arguments about what constitutes citation malpractice in both fields over the last few years, & there aren't necessarily neat conclusions (not referring to e.g. maura dykstra situation of obvious & widely agreed upon malpractice; i mean, people arguing about what the politics of citation are & what our responsibilities are—for example, academics regularly complain that journalists will consult them or read their work for a piece & then not cite them in it, journalists complain that academics will brush past their work when compiling bibliographies, academics across disciplines have several long-simmering differences of opinion about what kinds of politics one expresses with one's citations, journalists argue about credit & republication; i am not an academic or a journalist, so i am missing a lot!).

anyway setting these problems aside, there's the bigger issue that youtube videos as a rule are, i realize this is controversial, not academia and also not journalism. i don't think they are documentary filmmaking either, although our hbomb man is not particularly interested in the information culture of documentarians either. internet video is its own thing with its own information culture! but instead this is a video about how some people i have never heard of before on youtube did unethical stealing from other people i have mostly not heard of before, which i agree is not great but it does not seem to me like a four-hour emergency, probably because i am an old man who doesn't understand youtube. like, okay, we spent several lengthy minutes on what's going on with this illuminaughty person copying documentaries, but that argument felt to me weirdly both belabored & underdeveloped: yes, yes, we get it, the whole thing was lazily cribbed, i agree, that's really obnoxious, sure, okay, but like, do we have some articulation of what the line is? of what the norms are? because it seems to me like we kind of don't have a clear way that we handle citation in that space, by which i mean not just like 'APA format' or whatever but the substantive idea of referring to & building upon other people's intellectual work

please note here that i did not say 'intellectual property', because to me this is of course the elephant by the floral wallpaper. maybe it's in the last hour & i simply lack staying power! well-documented personal flaw! but in my experience, functional definitions of 'plagiarism' & theft of intellectual property arise only from disciplinary processes, either academic proceedings or legal ones, & each case is decided individually. more importantly as others have pointed out, when we make someone's ideas into legally codified property, they become alienable from their creator; intellectual property is a kind of enclosure of the commons. there's a reason i think that hguy's last video was about the ownership of a sound effect, & that he spent a lot of time being angry that someone else claimed the credit along with the legal ownership of/right to profit from the sound effect; the frustration with youtubers appropriating other people's work & the frustration with some bozo video game composer lying about how the "oof" got made are the same thing, but the thing is not "credit" or "rudeness" or "theft," it is the entire institution, i think, of intellectual property. not that there have never been reasonable claims made using intellectual property law, but come on almost none of this is the māori suit against lego, it's mostly corporate C&Ds and NDA'd artists stuck with non-competes. it's bleak! but we know how it happens, & it's not that some people are uncreative & moneygrubbing, so they look down on creatives (??), which has so far seemed to be the argument of this four-hour-long cultural moment

also i am still thinking about what kind of ideas & assumptions go into citation pratices, because i am a professional librarian (a bad one!), so i am professionally obliged to care about the set of skills referred to as 'information literacy' (the skills are real but i have like, mixed feelings about the framing, that's why scare quotes). if you are an academic librarian they will ask you to do 'information literacy,' and a lot of what they mean by that is 'tell students how to find sources for things & cite them properly,' which is, i think, kind of an interesting sleight of hand, in which a broad & powerful set of interpretive & analytical skills become [what is for many students] the dullest part of essay writing? but that's a problem with all of undergraduate education, basically. anyway if you talk to most students about citations they think they're onerous nonsense, and that plagiarism/'academic honesty' policies are arbitrary (& scary); they're not usually encouraged in any particular way to think about how citations are meant to function or what they're meant to do. i don't mean to disparage my colleagues in academic libraries; i am painting with a broad brush & anyway librarians usually have almost no input into course design or assignments.

it's disappointing how these information literacy discussions tend to go, though, because citations are interesting! they're also recent, in the grand scheme; the idea of telling us where you got some idea or other is very old, but the specifics of how & in what circumstances you're meant to do it aren't & they vary wildly by context. i often will tell people where i picked up whatever little factoid i am drolly recounting (sorry everyone) but that isn't particularly common in casual conversation. youtube videos are closer to a conversational register than they are to a documentary or a news article, much less an academic paper; i don't really know what to make of it, & i suspect this is part of why it is so easy to be a youtube personality who steals other people's work—it isn't really that youtube audiences are uniquely credulous & lazy, but that their expectations aren't the same. i guess i should note here that i do think you should cite things in a clear & easily followable manner, be honest about what is your own invention & what is borrowed from the work others, and avoid like. being a huge asshole. but to some degree i am bored by hearing about Some Guy Who Lies On Youtube, because my baseline assumption for most youtube videos is that they are not reliable & are probably trying to lie to me! i am not trying to be superior here that is an honest account of how i engage with anyone who appears to have a specialty lighting rig

i think continually & with affection of the late antique proliferation of the pseudo-somebody, and it seems to me now that the common modern practice of online (kindly) under-citation is a near-perfect inverse of the medieval approach, in which it was generally difficult to look things up and writers enhanced their authoritativeness by making referential claims to well-known authors. now it's usually easy to look things up & everybody wants to be an original thinker & an artist, so they don't cite. not me, though, i am just giving you here the garbled mash of things i've seen in posts & remember from my undergrad lectures eight years ago. i'm an idiot! but at least nobody here is making any money :)