14 DAY TRIAL // Creativity used to be all important in old times, as old as the beginning of the Internet as a public service and not just some sort of an intranet for some people and stations. Creativity brought new ways of thinking and of reasoning, it forever changed and enriched the expression of somebody's thoughts, comparisons and analogies being at the touch of a thought.
Hermann Maurer, professor at the Graz University of Technology, observed that the very foundations of evolution, innovation and creativity are currently under an intellectual blockade by the Internet offering means of informing oneself. Because a student is easily provided with everything, he/she no longer feels the need to deepen his/her inquiry on the matter and to find out related topics or the connections that can be made between various topics in a niche of thought.
Nowadays, the solution to everything, applied by the "Google Jockeys", is the copy/paste method: "They approach text segments in a totally different manner then the print socialized generation. Text segments found on the web are often appropriated despite their clearly claimed authorship or despite their clearly communicated copyright restrictions because they are seen as 'free' and/or 'highly reliable'. One often hears persons accused of net plagiarism justifying themselves: 'But it's already written on the web - why should I put it in new words anyway?' ", says Maurer.
It is rather disturbing to see such breaches of copyright, if nothing more, but even more disturbing is the reason why this is happening. It's not like the youth cannot think, it's that they don't want to, they are suffocated with information that shoots them from all angles; they take out the big red STOP sign and plant it in front of their creative stream of thoughts and just leave it there whilst indulging in the free and never ending fountain of knowledge that Google provides.