Moving Toward an Understanding...

So, I've been thinking a bit about my research topic, and it's been interesting to see the different viewpoints come in from friends, peers, enthusiasts, and scholars alike as to how digital media influences creativity. I wanted to post a couple of the responses that I've gotten, in part as a way for me to organize and recall some of the thoughts that I've had lately and in part so that you can hear the different opinions, because I feel like some of them are pretty interesting. Anyway, here's one from my friend, Xiaojia: 

I think it all really comes down to privacy. What do you want to be known, shared, if you want credit, etc. Possibilities are quite endless in both cyberworld and the physical world. And so many things can go between the both. The physical world may give you more privacy than the internet so that could lead to people feeling freer (that doesn't look like a word 8D) so they'd be more open to experiment. But anonymity on the internet could also encourage people to share without feeling the consequences (or at least a decent amount of consequences as a hard copy can create sometimes idk that's open to debate haha).
You should check out postsecret.com if you haven't already!
In the end the internet is just a resource.

There's a couple of ideas here that I want to touch upon: the first is this idea of privacy and expression, an idea that I've been discussing with my mom these past couple days. She's been working to publish a children's story, and I keep telling her that she should post a rough sketch of it on a blog or something so that she can get feedback and start to get people talking about her stuff, but she worries that if she posts it, someone will snatch it up and publish it before she can. That's one part of the internet that you really can't change: it's out there. People will see it. People will interact with it and judge it and change it, and in the end, it might not end up where you had originally intended it to go. I think that's one of the amazing things about the internet, though, as well, that you post something and it takes on a life of its own. If you're writing just for the money, then it's understood that you risk a lot in posting original content, but I've been really impressed at the fact that some bands work on donations alone and are thus able to offer their music for free (or for a price determined by each individual downloader). We are seeing a shift in media rights, an exodus in the direction of freeware and open-source software, and with it, we are witnessing the birth of a different breed of consumerism, a system fueled by the media Medicis, the thousands of private patrons of the arts that each put in their small sums in support of creativity.




The second idea is one expressed in Xiaojia's final closing sentence. She remarks that the Internet is just a resource. James Montmarquet, author of "Prometheus: Ayn Rand's Ethic of Creation," stated this same idea by saying "machines will be common to a free and an unfree society," or as I understand it, a society wherein creativity abounds may use the same resources as one wherein creativity is absent. The Internet is simply a facilitator. The more I have studied creativity and the internet, the more I am convinced of this fact. The Internet does not, in itself, cause people to be more creative or less creative. There is no magic link that makes people suddenly burst forth in song or pen a line that captures fully the enigma of the human soul. Nor is there a website that instantly drains a person of all sense of creative vision and compels him/her to post pictures of cats with misspelled subtitles. What the Internet offers is an increased potential to influence the world through our creative endeavors. The role of the great modern creators is still more or less individualistic, but the Internet and other digital resources offer the creator the option to combine his/her creative works with those of other minds, and as a result, creative efforts -- especially those involving digital media -- are daily becoming more and more social and more and more collaborative with each passing day. The ideal of creativity remains the same, but the potential for both inspiration and collaboration abounds.

I have kind of worried over the past years that creativity was dying. It seemed to me that all we ever saw was rehashes of the same hackneyed story, poorly made sequels to old classics, and mediocre story lines to garnish what I'm sure were supposed to be cutting-edge graphics. Montmarquet wrote about this idea of the death of the Promethian creator, and it was one that really piqued my interest. As I've looked into it more, I don't know that I would say that creativity is gone or has fled -- I think maybe it is just taking different forms, and the Internet is opening my eyes to the wonders of human innovation and thought.