We all appreciate the penny dish. It's that quintessential "freebie" that sits in front of a cash register. It adds convenience when you don't have to fumble through your change to make a purchase, creates purchasing power if you're short by a little and it makes your pockets lighter by preventing you from having to break another dollar.
But how many pennies should one be able to take out? One? What if your item costs $6.03 - can you take three? What if there are only three pennies left in the dish and there is someone else behind you in line who might need to use it?
What if you happen to spot a wheat penny in there? Should you spend it? Or should you take it - it might be collectible and, after all, it's just a penny.
Or perhaps there's a coin in there that looks like a US penny but it's not. Maybe it's a Canadian penny which is useful a little ways north but scrap metal here (if you're Canadian imagine a US penny). Maybe you can pass it off as a real penny and the cashier won't notice. Or you could point it out and remove it. Or simply ignore it.
There might also be some pocket lint and other debris in the dish as well. After all, that's how the penny dish is funded - people occasionally deposit their spare pennies into the dish and it becomes a virtuous cycle for next-comers.
The Internet is kind of like a penny dish. It's a big receptacle of ideas - a massive one. There are billions of web pages with trillions of thoughts on them. Every day people stop by and drop their ideas into cyberspace for the world to see. And most of these ideas are free for the taking. You can read them, save them, forward them, post them, discuss them and even steal them. There really are no bounds.
In fact writing on the Internet is a bit different from what we were taught in school about writing papers. You had to diligently flag where your ideas came from and either footnote the source or reference a bibliography at the back. Otherwise you were guilty of plagiarism and, if the teacher found out, you received an "F." And maybe there were even worse consequences than that.
As an online writer you're constantly faced with the same issue, but the rules of the Internet are different. Instead of footnotes we link to others' pages. Or maybe we don't. It depends on the scruples of the writer. Better yet, it just depends on the views of the writer. Wikipedia uses footnotes but that's only to add the perception of credibility; the consequence of an un-footnoted idea is simply "[citation needed]," put in place by the site's editors. The stuff on the Internet is free for the taking. Inevitably someone else will have a different view on the same idea and will provide new perspective for me or others. That's where the value of the link comes in. And another writer is likely to link if they know they are offering a new and credible perspective.
That's the point of the Internet - it's a communication medium that facilitates the distribution of information and ideas.
Getting back to the penny dish. Unfortunately there's lots of pocket debris on the Internet. Probably 80-90% of it. You have to sift through to find the pennies. It's not so hard though - it just takes a little bit of time and informed searching to find them. There are lots of pennies out there, all fine and useful and informative and interesting in their own way. (Every penny is different - tarnished, shiny, old, new, dinged up, scratched up, stamped differently, etc.)
Every once in awhile you'll find a Canadian penny. It's a site, a page, an idea or even a business, posing as a penny when it's really not. It's scrap metal. You might be duped into thinking it's a real gem (if a penny can be thought of as a gem) and get burned or be made to look silly. Many of us have been there as well, but that's just another part of the Internet.
And there's the wheat penny too - a rare or compelling idea that gets you excited. You see genius in it, want to read it over again and want pass it on to others and maybe even steal the idea for your own use. Generally you'll find lots of pennies and a wheat penny here and there. Both are useful.
All that's okay, but if you want to create your own content, how many pennies should you take while still making that content your own? One? Three? Eight?
Not exactly sure, but from a penny dish it's clearly okay to take one - otherwise what's the point? And I'm pretty sure it's not okay to take eight - that's being greedy. Perhaps the rule is four, otherwise you'd be expected to use a nickel instead. And maybe you cut back if the pennies in the dish are in extremely short supply.
Fortunately the Internet is virtually limitless so there's no supply constraint. But I think the nickel concept might be useful. It's educated guesswork, but if you're essentially repeating someone's prose online without much of your own thinking, or you're not synthesizing different ideas to make a new point, you probably need to come up with your own nickel. Otherwise you're at the risk of adding to the pile of pocket debris and Canadian pennies that are out there. At the other end of things, you can take ideas and create a wheat penny of your own. That's leveraging the real value of the Internet and adding to the stock of information and ideas others can use.
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January 25, 2009 edition of Everything Worth Reading
