Plagiarism and inspiration

There is a thing which has been on my mind for some time - the difference between plagiarism and inspiration: why is it that something will be categorized as plagiarism, while others slip through the eye of the needle and are recognized just to have been "inspired"?
When one subscribes to the opinion that not only have most things been said before; most have also been said in a better and clearer way before, then one must simultaneously accept that most of the things one can acheive, must be acheived through inspiration - very little comes from nothing. So the important thing must be to make sure that one has something to be inspired by.
Somewhere, I have seen the quote that you have to read thousands of books, before you can write one, and most likely, this is true, then you will have been exposed to sufficient amounts of information (and quite probably also information of divergent nature and content) to form and formulate your own opinion.
And when you have formed and formulated your own opinion, then you can always start looking back at the things you were inspired by and use these as references, make sure that quotes appear verbatim et cetera - and then, you have not leaned on any single source, not copied, not plagiarized.
(Translated from Plagiat og inspiration, originally published January 18, 2010)

Internet makes stupid - unless you're careful

...what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

This is the American author Nicholas G. Carr's interpretation of, what Google, Facebook and other of the marvels of the internet do to us - we become zappers, constantly chasing new bites of information, without being able to dive into anything. Our power of concentration disappears, and we barely register the title of one article before we are in search of the next, which we do not have time to dive into.
I have thought about it before: that I myself was about to be hit by it, news and general information junkie as I am, but I do think, however, that I will be able to escape.
Or rather, my eternal quest to know everything about everything, not just keywords about everything will save me. For instance, it was not enough for me just to read on the front page of a news paper that "Facebook and Google will change your mind."
First, I had read the article in the paper, then the original piece from The Atlantic, and finally I had to find out who Nicholas G. Carr was. Fortunately I think that is more reminiscent of scuba than jet skis, and that's how I intend to continue to operate. But then again, I know all too well that I am reactionary and old-fashioned.
(Translated from Internet gør dum - hvis man ikke passer på, originally posted December 15, 2008)