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Charles Leadbetter
, an independent writer and advisor on technology and creativity. Outlines a technological future of collaborative creativity founded in the ethos of folk art
A video of Dan Dunn, the young performance artist who paints with both hands at the same time, has attracted 8.5 million views on YouTube. Lasse Gjertsen, a 22-year-old from Larvik, Norway, has become an international star by making intricately cut home videos that have reached an audience of more than 2 million. Innovation and creativity, long the preserve of the professional, is now also for Pro-Ams who do it for the love of it but to very high standards. Distributing, sharing, rating, ranking, borrowing, amending, copying and adapting this material is also spreading, out of the hands of mainstream publishers into the web’s social networks.
Everything is getting scrambled up by the way the web is enabling more people to participate and collaborate in producing culture. At times it feels like an explosion of everyday creativity, with more ideas coming from more sources. Often it feels like a descent into cacophony, confusion and chaos, the only escape from which is to submerge oneself in social networks of people and ideas that are already comfortably familiar.
The cast-iron categories of industrial-era media are breaking down. Demand can generate some of its own supply, if it has the tools. Spectators, at least some of them, some of the time, can become producers. For some people – Lasse Gjertsen toiling away in his bedroom – leisure looks suspiciously like work; while many companies clumsily attempt to make work look like leisure by turning offices into cafés. Professionals, it turns out, do not have all the answers, in a world in which television news bulletins can be led by footage from camera phones. But then who do we trust to provide us with fact and truth, when Wikipedia with its five employees attracts more web traffic than the BBC with its hundreds of well-trained journalists?
The motto for the generation growing up with this capability to participate and collaborate, culturally and creatively, is ‘We Think Therefore We Are’. It is by the masses not just for them. This is raising difficult issues about controlling quality when the traditional gatekeepers have been overrun.
We used to know where new ideas would come from: special people in special places; the writer in their garret, the designer in their studio, the boffin in the lab. The century just gone created a society of mass production for mass consumption – creativity and cultural expression was mainly for an elite. In the century to come, new ideas will come from many people and places. Collaborations to create new ideas, games, software programmes, scientific theories, will also become more common. As more people share ideas and collaborate, it will become more difficult to work out exactly who had which idea. We like to think that each and every new idea has a sole author and a eureka moment. That romantic ideal will become more difficult to sustain.
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