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Content Reuse and Repackaging: Is it Possible
to Create Original Content
What is content? It’s just another word for information and there’s plenty of it all around us. Without a blink, without a think, assisted by our individual mental filters, we continuously assimilate, reassemble, and then regurgitate new sets of ideas and beliefs. These are happily repackaged as one’s very own. How convincing they are often depends on how loudly one thumps the table!
Brainwaves and unique ideas, sadly, have a terrifying way of repeating themselves in somebody else’s work. This must be a fault of our limited minds – our structured experience and lobotomized thinking. Suddenly everything in our ads goes “takatak”. Suddenly everybody is finding African literature captivating and ‘cute’. Suddenly all newspapers have the same lifestyle stories. No, it can’t be freaky. It’s just good old content reuse and repackaging in a stratified society.
Even as I write this, I know there’s nothing unique in what I’m putting down, except that I choose to say it in response to a very stolidly stated topic.
To get down to brass tacks, to the dal roti question: Is it possible to create original content?
Unless you are a genuine ‘Eureka’ person, most research or expositions – about anything - will be based on someone else’s intellectual property and experience. How much propriety and value you add to it depends on your grey cells. Therein lies the rub. Value addition is the name of the game.
But value addition is difficult and time consuming. You need to let the content swim in your own head, live and breathe with it a bit, allow it to seep into your pores so that you discard dry skin, and grow new cells of information. In this dollar driven, bottom fishing world, is it possible to achieve such self-gratification without getting dropped from the project?
Surprisingly daft for a Harvard scholar, Kaavya Viswanathan became “a victim of her own ambition”, to use another writer ’s words. What was she up to? Possibly, caught at a writer’s block, she thought nothing of a control C control V operation. Quick money, quick success, did her in.
How much to borrow and in what way to posit it as your own can only be decided by Honesty and Integrity, very old fashioned words and even older values.
Unfortunately people with hunger in their bellies find a way of rationalizing their actions. These values have to be propagated by the people at the controls. If all they want is unqualified, mindless content to fill empty spaces, regardless of quality, we shall be cawing like the Kaavyas, and our brains will be dead.
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