Where Is Creativity? by Shorthose Jim Maycroft Neil

Author:Shorthose, Jim,Maycroft, Neil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-04-06T04:41:40+00:00

Chapter 5

The new media landscape

When we think of where creativity resides, and when we think of developing a broad multi-disciplinary account of this, and when we think of going beyond the orthodoxy of the individualistic conception, we now have to think about the impact of the Web. Over the past twenty years the Web has changed a lot of things, perhaps not so much or so fundamentally as the early hype told us, but still a lot has changed. Any broad account of the location of creativity has to take it into account. This is but one current phase in the much longer relationship between creativity and technology. But it is a particular one, with particular characteristics which have a bearing upon the what , how and where of creativity.

New creative processes, ways of forging creative working relationships and ways of getting work out there are clearly developing in lots of different ways. This is because new media and the Web have forged new practices of creative origination, but over and above that, new processes of production, dissemination and consumption. It has led to new spaces for creative relationship building leading to new forms of co-creativity. This new media landscape brings shifts in business-oriented creativity for a mass market towards the customization and personalization of cultural production and consumption, which represent new forms of interaction between producers and consumers.

However, we should be careful of the hype within all this. In his book Uncanny Networks , Lovnik (2004) argues that despite the new possibilities offered by the Web, genuine cross-disciplinary creativity has not really happened. He argues that new media have so far only really been used as specific tools within discrete arenas of creativity. He notes that within assumptions about new media there has been little reflection or actual practical take up of the potential of the Web for genuine collaborative, cross-disciplinary creativity. Maybe that is still to come, but this is not the ringing endorsement of the new media landscape as a great stimulus for collaborative creativity. There are, however, as we will see below, many other voices who take a different view, that the Web in general and the new media landscape in particular has fast become a space of new creativity, new sensibilities and motivations which drive that work, and new forms of cultural dissemination and distribution. We ourselves tend towards that view, not least because we have ourselves used them whilst publishing books previously to this one. As we will see, the edge, the DiY, the self-organized, is now much more able to get on with things without the permission of the traditional Centres.

A second key point for us within this chapter is the concern to move our debate away from considering the new media landscape as just a list of discrete new creative tools, software packages and the like. We want look at the issues concerning how the new media landscape might impact upon the nature and character of creativity and its inner practices

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