Whatever Happened to an Original Idea?

Ben Greenman, for the Daily Beast, laments our loss of original ideas thanks to the internet.

From the story...

With that said, though, there’s a problem, and it isn’t about Saturday Night Live or Brett Favre’s naked bootleg. It’s about the Internet, and how quickly it lets us track cases of alleged borrowing and appropriation. When Juan Williams was fired by NPR last month for what the radio network considered intemperate remarks regarding Muslims, the Internet erupted. That’s what it does. People accused Williams of racism at the same time that other people accused NPR of overreaction and knee-jerk political correctness. I didn’t want to weigh in until I had seen the actual interview—which now, thanks to that same Internet, is efficiently archived. Williams said that he’s nervous when he sees people in “Muslim garb.” I understood his point, at some level. He was saying that his perception of Muslims was permanently changed by the 9/11 attacks.

But there was a flaw in his reasoning. Leaving aside that Williams seemed to have a monolithic, almost cartoonish idea of “Muslim garb,” it occurred to me that Islamic terrorists are the least likely to dress traditionally. Their strategy, were they to try to board a plane with a weapon, would be to dress as inconspicuously as possible. I was thinking about it, so I sent something out via Twitter.

About 10 minutes later, I got an email from someone I didn’t know. It accused me of stealing the insight. I don’t know why he didn’t just tweet back or even send me a direct message. Twitter has all those features built into it, for maximum annoyance. But he chose to email.

He told me that other people online had already thought of that argument, and had even said so online. One of them, he said, was Jeffrey Goldberg, who used to work at The New Yorker, where I work: The implication, I guess, was that I had somehow shadowed Jeff, taken his idea, and then claimed it as my own.

This is idiotic in many ways. First of all, it’s not true. I didn’t see anything that Jeff wrote, and while I agree with him on this point, it’s only because he agrees with me. Second of all, how have we reached the point where the standard for a thought is chronological primacy?