Technology changes the way we do things. The fact that it does is not an astounding revelation. However, it is always fascinating to see how it does.
When we think about “creativity” from a classical perspective, we might picture a person creating a piece of artwork, whether it is a painting, a piece of music, a novel, etc. In the past, creative collaboration occurred on a very small scale, if at all. Today, the creativity landscape is shifting, thanks to the tools we have at our disposal with modern technology. One of the key ways technology has changed the world is communication. This opens the door for a type of collaboration that was not possible before.
How does this impact our view of “creativity”?
Unlike the past, where a creative, highly-skilled individual — or a small group of highly-skilled individuals — would develop a work of art, we can now develop tools that allow millions of people to contribute to a single project.
One example of this is Drawball.com. Drawball, which launched in late 2005, allows anyone to pick up a virtual airbrush and paint graffiti on one giant digital wall. While the majority of users contribute little more than a mess of scribbles, there is a “hall of fame” area that showcases some of the best drawings spotted on the wall.
Another example, though on a much smaller scale, is BrainFuel.tv‘s Caption Contest Fridays (with spin-off site Caption Fridays). Every week, there is a new photo that begs the question “What’s going on here?” and visitors are encouraged to make up a caption to explain what is going on in the photo. It is great to go through the comments at the end of the day to see what the blog’s readers had written.
This concept is fascinating and motivated me to start small, for-fun projects like Crappy Graphs (where visitors can draw their own ‘crappy graphs’) and TwitLibs (where visitors choose words or phrases to fill in the blanks in my sentences). I am constantly surprised by how great (or how terrible) the visitor submissions are.
Crappy Graphs started out as a blog where I drew and posted my own graphs. After releasing the user submission tool that allows users to draw graphs in my design/template, the best visitor-submitted graphs found their own way out onto the internet and now draw in more traffic than the main blog itself. That means collectively, Crappy Graphs’ visitors are funny than the original Crappy Grapher, me.
It is clear to me that none of us are as creative as all of us.
Ah the power of communities. Indeed they are powerful. But be careful using definitive language such as, “It is clear to me that none of us are as creative as all of us.”, your point is clear in this post but there are also downsides to opening up communities. In some cases a community can be a bad idea. Creative direction can become subject to group think. For instance, do you think that SxSW’s effort to make the panel selection a community effort this year and last year was a good idea? I’ve heard many complaints from people who went the year before last year. Apparently, the quality of the panels last year were far inferior to those of the prior year. It’s all good and well but communities can have just as many positives as they do negatives. Your citations are of successful community efforts but there can be many cases where it may not be appropriate. *I’m not saying the SxSW panel picker is necessarily inappropriate but it is entirely possible.
It is up to the service provider to have measures in place to focus attention on the good and push the bad away from the spotlight. With Drawball, for example, the hall of fame section shows an extremely small percentage of contributions. If it instead displayed a random sector, you would mostly only see scribbles and it would be very uninteresting.
The point is that if you 1.) build a tool that allows people to express themselves, 2.) provide a mechanism for giving more attention to good work and less attention to junk, and 3.) get a significant amount of traffic, you are bound to be surprised and impressed by the results.
The SXSW panel picker is not entirely related to this subject, because it is not about the crowd’s ideas & creativity. The panel picker is not a venue for submitting ideas; it is a rating system.
Good points Brian. So what’s next after crappy graphs? Have you dived into AS3/FLEX yet? Creating another cool community app could be a good excuse to mess with that stuff.
oh god, brian, now i have to go and check those sites out. no, of course i don’t “have” to. but honestly, i think this sort of social media creativity really presents a whole new challenge to artists and creatives. in days past, we’d have to drag ourselves to a gallery or a poetry reading and the sheer clunky physicality of that would limit the exposure. what’s the worst/most that could happen? a week at the louvre? but now the options are unlimited and if we want to stay on the wave, we need to go check out at least a few of them. how to do that with only 24 hours and a limited brain capacity? it’s not possible. something’s gotta shift. what will it be?