Scavenging Blog Post #1

For the world of music, almost everything, if not everything, is derivative of some other artist, or song, a voice clip, or even just a sound. For the most part, in the world of music, it is typically deemed “okay” to sample an artist or a song if proper credit is given, or if the thing that is being sampled is changed and altered enough so that it does not really resemble it anymore. At the University of Illinois, professors usually encourage having different sources and to make sure that we incorporate them into our writing, but usually this is to a certain extent. If we use excessive quotations or use a lot of paraphrasing in our writing, then a lot of professors usually get upset that we are not being original enough. Depending on the types of classes that the student is in, adopting a looser version of copying things could be beneficial to the students. The term “plagiarism” carries a lot of negative feelings towards it, but the terms “sampling’ and “influence” are a lot more forgiving, so if even if these words were incorporated into the classes, it could help students become more creative, but only if the guidelines are made clear to them. When Guy Raz is talking to Kirby Ferguson, he says that he does not think there is an original idea left in the world and that humanity is not capable of coming up with an original idea anymore. This may sound kind of negative, but it does not mean that we cannot invent anything, but that we just have to rely on the ideas and designs that we have already created. When Raz is talking with Johanna Blakley, they spend the whole time discussing the way all fashion is influenced and she also talks about how no idea is original and they all are designs based off of preexisting things.  I thought this was interesting because the worlds of fashion and music, despite being so different, share the common element of influence and sampling.