VERSIONING

This chapter is an exercise in versioning and focuses on Michelle Obama's 2008 speech, which was plagiarized by Melania Trump in 2016 to discuss how remixing, sampling, and versioning are part of an unprecedented knowledge-based economy. It suggests that public speech/public expression in the political domain is of the national discourse around originality, authenticity, and what it means to use other people's words and creative expression in the public domain. The eerie situation in our postmodern info-overloaded culture is that within minutes of Melania Trump's plagiarism airing live on every possible media outlet, there was a direct confrontation with the fact that her speech contained material directly copied from Michelle Obama's speech. The basic premise was a critique of plagiarism from people all over the world using the web. The Internet is built modularly, and it grows rapidly because people with all levels of knowledge copy code and share resources.