"For Sale by 'Author': Online Essay Mills and Authorship in the Academy"
About the AuthorDanielle Roach is currently pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric and New Media at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia where she is also serving as the Assistant Director of Composition Studies. She has taught writing for about seven years and is especially interested in multimodal composition and play in the writing classroom. Her research interests include digital communities, authorship, rhetorics of play, computers and composition, writing program administration, and digital humanities. ContentsWriting: The "Right Way" versus the "Wrong Way" |
OEMs and Academic AuthorshipSeveral aspects of the ongoing conversation about authorship in general seem especially prescient when examining OEMs and authorship in the academy. Theories of authorship offer some tools for the consideration of how these essay mills function to convey and shape cultural ideas about writing, authorship, and the academy to students. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, discusses cultural intermediaries as functioning in the spaces in between social classes or between the producer and the consumer, and indeed we can see the same patterns emerge in the relationship between students and the academy via these OEMs. Although certainly no one would argue that these mills are somehow arbiters of good taste (as Bourdieu constructs cultural intermediaries when he discusses their role in the circulation of high culture and art), the parallels between the two scenarios offer some key insights into the circulation of cultural norms in this new quasi-digital realm. Keith Negus’s examination of non-traditional groups that function as cultural intermediaries offers a starting point for such an endeavor. Negus problematizes how a narrower view of cultural intermediaries often accords certain workers a pivotal role in these processes of symbolic mediation, prioritizing a narrow and reductionist aesthetic definition of culture . . . Hence, representation, "meaning" and the symbolic are treated as "cultural", whereas the notion of culture as a "whole way of life" seems to be rather marginalized or forgotten—or applied only to the selected workers engaged in "symbolic activities". . . Yet there are many other occupational groupings that are crucial to processes of cultural mediation or the linkages which might connect consumption with production. (504) Thus, Negus’s insistence that cultural intermediaries need not be limited to “creatives” allows for the examination of entities like OEMs that serve a similar function in relation to already-stratified social groups. Indeed, Bourdieu himself insists that “the new cultural intermediaries are inclined to sympathize with discourses aimed at challenging the cultural order and the hierarchies which the cultural 'hierarchy' aims to maintain” (366). We see this sympathy (or at least a feigned version of it) in the language used by OEMs, as it seeks to align itself with the needs and anxieties of the students. Perhaps another way to approach the circulation of ideas and power between these OEMs, students, and the academy is to consider all the parties in terms of how they participate in the discussion. Raymond Williams discusses how a given social moment, group, or interaction can be understood in terms of the dominant, residual, and emergent features circulating through a particular group at a given moment. These categories offer some useful insight as to both the potential opportunities for change afforded to and by these OEMs but also ways in which their language may in fact reinforce academic ideas about authorship. Williams suggests that while what cultural standards that serve as “dominant” should be closely examined, we must also be careful to consider other features that shape how ideology circulates: "We certainly have to speak of the ‘dominant’ . . . but we find that we also have to speak, and indeed with further differentiation of each, of the 'residual' and the 'emergent,' which in any real process and at any moment in the process are significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the characteristics of the 'dominant'" (121-22). The “residual,” as Williams explains, represents practices and ideas that were once in the dominant but are no longer, while the “emergent” represents those features which are just beginning to circulate and which have the potential to someday become part of the dominant. Applying this framework to the discourse surrounding this particular site of contestation can help explain both how OEMs claim to situate themselves in relation to academic discourse but also how they perhaps function very differently from that claimed role. The current dominant ideology of authorship, though certainly in flux, raises the text to a high position of power within the academy, and so the text’s author/owner becomes privileged as a commodity as well. Roland Barthes surmises that “historically, the reign of the Author has been that of the Critic” (147). If we consider this idea in terms of academic writing, we can see how the new historicism and its allies have shaped even the very notions of authorship in the writing classroom. Because the text has been the fetishized object of the critic (i.e. the instructor), authorship has been formally conceived as a singular endeavor. Certainly some residual ideologies interact with this dominant mode of thought about the author, complicating and sometimes contradicting what we know to be “true” or “absolute” about authorship and ownership of a text. Notions of communal authoring and storytelling that dominated earlier primarily oral cultures, particularly prior to the invention of the printing press, seem to be at odds with the more dominant metaphors of authorship proffered by printed texts. Kembrew Macleod explains: "The invention of the printing press . . . was instrumental in facilitating the shift from oral to written manuscript, then to print culture in Europe. Print culture resulted in attempts to close down intertextuality by emphasizing Romantic notions of 'originality' and 'creativity,' and at this time there came into being the notion that words can be privately owned" (72). Additionally, the Enlightenment and the advent of mass printing production further marginalized this more overt notion of intertextuality as the social power of author and text as commodity became even more prevalent in the late-18th and early-19th century. Clearly, these models of authorship hold limited sway in light of the current dominant ideology that privileges the commodifiable text. However, with these oral traditions and storytelling cultures still lurking in the background of our collective ideology, the potential exists for residual ideas about authorship that dominated discourse prior to the Enlightenment to push back against the notion of the singular author in ways that undermine the legitimacy of the now-dominant model. Ironically then, on the other end of Williams’ spectrum, the emergent ideology has begun to almost hyper-realize the commodity metaphor inherent in current dominant understandings of “intellectual property,” and it is in this realm that OEMs purport to situate themselves. Just as Murphy suggests that students reason that “since possession is nine-tenths of the law, it must belong to the assembler,” so these OEMs take that logic to the next level, promoting all kinds of intellectual products as property whose ownership is determined solely by who found and/or paid for it (39). Sites like these OEMs, then, seem at first glance to engage in the promotion of an emerging ideology that situates authorship as a commodity. Particularly with sites offering custom essays, the language suggests that the essay is simply a commodifiable product, promoting this model through various rhetorical strategies. Sites like WriteMyEssay.com offer perks like a “free bibliography/works cited page” and “free revision if research does not match instructions.” Many of the OEMs heavily promote their quality customer service, and some sites even give students around-the-clock access to customer service representatives via chat and toll-free phone numbers (PaperMasters.com and BestEssayHelp.com, among others). Even the language of value and “bargain-shopping” is prominent at these sites; BestEssayHelp.com, for example, offers the following guarantee: "Here, at BestEssayHelp.com, we understand that customers are looking for a bargain when seeking the help of online writing agencies. On the one hand, there is great desire to receive an outstanding piece of writing, while, on the other hand, to spend as little as possible. Well, if this is what you are looking for, BestEssayHelp.com is your undisputable choice! We provide the best essay writing services at reasonable prices, making your writing experience with us fruitful and beneficial." In these ways, a cursory examination of OEMs would seem to indicate that they seek to subvert the dominant by embracing a contradictory emergent strand of discourse that disregards the power of the academy in shaping societal notions of authorship. However, as much as these sites seem to succeed in shaping the essay as commodity, the very premise of their existence can be seen as resting squarely on the very dominant ideology that these sites supposedly subvert. Macleod argues that because the academy has come to accept the model of the singular author, students who feel somehow disenfranchised by academic discourse “are those who engage in discursive tactics that do not conform to these conceptualizations of originality and authorship” (71-72). And yet we can see that in fact the very act of engaging in these practices, as embodied by OEMs, serves not to subvert but instead to privilege the very discourse which has denied them voice. As these OEMs reify the essay as a way to meet the demands of the institution, they are, in effect, telling students that those expectations are justified and worth fulfilling, whether legitimately or not. OEMs promise to offer students not an alternate conceptualization of authorship, but instead merely a way to game the system to give the appearance of meeting those dominant expectations. Additionally, these sites can potentially distance students even further from any position of real power by reinforcing the dominant ideology, with sites like PaperMasters.com encouraging students to “give us the research paper topic, detailed description and due date of your research paper - Leave the research and writing up to the professionals!” By situating the site’s own writers as “professionals,” they necessarily imply that students are something other than that standard, that they are not writers and that perhaps they should not try to be. Perhaps symbolic of the complications of the relationship between the university and these OEMs is the screenshot in Fig. 1 from a site called EssayInfo.com. The origins of the site are unclear, but it purports to have been initiated as a student project. The following description is taken from the site’s footer: EssayInfo is the online essay writing center designed to help high school, college and university students. It brings together tons of useful information on academic writing and quick tips for writing perfect essays, term papers, research works, presentations and college projects. EssayInfo was started by students as a university project and grew to the biggest resource about academic writing, resume writing, financial aid, scholarships, online degrees and college education. At any rate, the site ostensibly provides guidelines for students on how to write certain types of papers, but because it is powered by GoogleAds, it is flanked by literally dozens of windows linking to related “products.” The screen shot captures the irony of the surrounding ads: while topped by a banner ad for Old Dominion University, the body text is framed by dozens of stacked boxes offering “Awesome A+ Essays,” “Premium Writing Service,” and even “essays for $10.” Examples like this problematize attempts to juxtapose academic expectations with the presentation of authorship by OEMs; indeed, both are institutions, and both operate within and in response to systems that commodify knowledge, albeit sometimes in slightly different ways, but always with an eye toward social power and influence. |