Cutting and Pasting of America!

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author

Boy were our parents wrong. They said “Don’t use the calculator,” feeling it’ll hurt our multiplication abilities. Shit – look at how much we (mostly people who know better) use the Net to cheat. It’s uncanny. And that burns me up.

I just spent a full two weeks at my PR firm asking people to “write in your own words,” and yet every single guy or gal uses entire phrases from the ole InterWeb. It seems like just cutting and pasting is the only way to get things done. I’m not sure when this began.

Perhaps when low-hanging successes became the norm?

You can take an entire phrase and toss it on Google with quotation marks; voila, you see where it came from. But stealing fine sentences to fill in a gap (or just stealing) seems to be the norm. Being caught does not matter—hopefully NOT being caught is what does.

It’s a world where shortcuts exist for us to take advantage of, or that’s what I am starting to believe. Yet if it’s all about the written word, in order for people to stop cutting and pasting their lives away…they need the self-confidence that, uh-huh, their thoughts are valuable—and should be trusted.

On Thursday, I saw one of my esteemed staff cut and paste a report to a client, no less, from one of those firms that creates a video of a seconds-long appearance on TV. Why the guy couldn’t just explain what it was himself is a mystery. The part that made me shake my head Bobble style is at the end this company tells us “The PR value here is $328,” meaning that if we’d paid for five seconds’ worth of commercial that’s what it would have cost said client.

Now, everyone knows metrics like these are useless (It’s PR, not advertising) and so, to make a long story longer, it now is obvious this late 20’s fast-mover didn’t bug himself to see what he pasted in his report. D’oh! Why bother reading, right? Surely the company knows what they’re saying.

The point I keep trying to make it to anyone who’ll listen, is that your words are what matters—not others’. And now worse proof of civilization being dumber than ever:

I hired two smart young gentlemen to help with some research on a very complicated project…. lots of small chapters about an upcoming terrific period. Every single day I had to say “in your own words,” since Wikipedia makes it so easy to … say it together, steal. For a book? I mean, it’s hard enough to keep information straight without having to worry that a book has tons of found info in it.

And the older generation worried that calculators would deplete our smarts? Big laugh now. What’s good for the soul, in my non-humble feeling, is when you go into your own head and create a thought, then put it on paper. After all, that’s all we’ve got to proffer: opinions, and maybe an ethical compunction to do the right thing.

Let’s make our Moms glad those snazzy multiplication devices didn’t start us on a slippery slope. And stop the cutting and pasting crap!

This post, which yeah I cut and paste from my own work, is excerpted from the coming McGraw-Hill book, “2011: TrendSpotting for the Next Decade,” not a moment too soon.