Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Effort is a thing of the past

What drives our decisions? Is it fear or is it laziness?

I believe the majority of human decisions were made through the motivation of either fear or laziness. When specifically talking about plagiarism and this generation of students, I believe that laziness is a growing personality defect and is the number one cause of plagiarism in the university.

Instant gratifaction. What a great way to sum up the "advancement" of the last decade or so. This generation has been raised and nourished in the motherly embrace of technological advancements and widely accepted social norms that only advocate laziness. Today, we seem to be obsessed with the notion of little work resulting in a big pay-off. But I do not believe this is entirely our fault.

To evolve from a world that involves strenuous labor to accomplish our everyday tasks, our nation's intelligent souls created a handy little device that required less work. Why spend your time tediously searching for the perfect book, when you can offer up this task for something else to do? Why break your back opening up that library book miss, when all you've got to do is scroll down using your index finger? Why spend the time looking for the newspaper stories you'd like to read when you've got something else to do it for you? Effort is a thing of the past. Thank you Mozilla Firefox!

We are lazy because we have been bred to adopt this trait. We want the information to be to-the-point, and instantly available. We no longer read stories, we read headlines. We no longer photo-copy books or copy down sentences, (with a pencil and paper!) we cut and paste. We want our cheeseburgers and milkshakes NOW dammit!

With the dense amount of information that is easily and instantly accesible, it is not difficult to imagine students utterly baffled by the concept of crediting an author. Information is everywhere. It is buzzing about our ears and displayed on strange and portable screens. All you need is an index finger. We do not value the owner, the abundance of information belongs to us.

I also mentioned some faulty social norms that also helped to brew our lazy spirits. Laziness, I believe, is also evident in all of these horrid law suits that we throw around like tennis balls. This generation has seen quite the display of a socially-acceptable "blame game." We cop-out of consequences and give them to someone else to bear. Very similar to internet, eh?

Plagiarism is birthed through lazy decision-making, nurtured by the overwhelming laziness evident in society. We do not understand why we should go to the effort of writing something sentence by sentence when we have been taught that someone/something could do it for us. Besides, we have better things to do, like updating our facebook status.

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