I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
The New York
Times has talked about academic plagiarism before (from online), especially
with respect to fake books, but it has two recent important op-eds.
On Sept. 7,
Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi wrote about the “term paper writing”
business overseas, of course checked for by sites like Turnitin.
Today, Richard
Conniff touched the pirated book copy business again, with “Steal this
Book?There’s a Price”, where there are
a few hundred copies of his own books.
I think
about 15 years ago, I heard from a couple teachers that a couple of my own
sidebar essays on the legacy “do ask do tell” site had been plagiarized and
turned in – that was before I became a sub myself.I never really did anything about it.It seems well for persons who turn to writing
at mid-life to express their own analysis of something like “the draft v. gays
in the military” because they had lived it personally.Then that expands out.And especially in the early Web 1.0 days with
search engines favoring amateur content because of simpler HTML format, a lot
of armchair pundits could do a whole generation’s thinking.It sounds cool to pretend you’re in the elite
– but as social media algorithms come along, the masses get dumber, and fall
behind, and we get Trump as president, who does nothing good for integrity.
True, the
most gifted kids love learning and science and reading for its own sake (take
John Fish 101 on YouTube) and sometimes make spectacular contributions (like in
the “Science Fair” movie for NatGeo).
But the
dropoff is quick, and a huge majority of today’s young adults understand only
tribalism, not abstract thinking about principles.
Conniff
makes the point that consumers have gotten used to content being free (despite
the paywalls).That raises the point
that an author who offers content free because he can (and has enough assets
from others sources) may be distorting the debate – and may be lowballing the
entire system.
I’ve been
personally concerned with this for some time, the last two years especially, as
a problem close in importance to the better understood problem with
clickbait.Both can lead to more
radicalization – a concern we never thought about ten years ago.But now, indeed, we have Trump.
I do wonder
if we could face a day when books won’t stay listed (as on Amazon) if they
don’t maintain some kind of sales performance benchmark, even when POD.It would make many would-be writers think
twice entering the speech world on their own and avoiding conventional
“partisan” and “identarian” activism. It sounds all too logical.The radical Left would love this. Update: Sept 17: I would also call attention to the IT Jobs blog (Sept 15) about the effects of California's AB 5 on freelance journalists, who could be "forced" to become employees and be so tethered if they write over a certain volume of articles for one publication. It would be interesting to wonder if having your own separate blog(s) as I do would become an antidote (I don't live in CA, but could work with a CA publication, conceivably.)
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