Aug 23
2010
In the age of the network, we are exposed to the patterns of our behaviors—the similarities in what we search for, the rhythms of how and what we communicate, and the way that tiny unconscious cues shape the way we act.
How does exposure to the network impact the way you think about creativity and individuality?
Mark gave the final word
Individuality is a bit of a red herring. We’ve all got that. The network can bring us face to face with ways in which we aren’t unique, much more easily than it can show us how we are. It can make you feel like you don’t have anything to add, and that even if you did it’s a cacophony anyway, who would listen? But it’s not one big cacophony, it’s lots of small bands playing at once, and you can tune in to the ones you like.
Tuesday, August 24 at 9:01pm
Endless inspiration. Exposure to the network has changed my professional persona and my creative self by giving me easy access to an incredibly sophisticated audience (for support, feedback, inspiration, confidence, motivation). Sometimes I’m aware of the isolation factor too, and it does give me pause. One good remedy: making an effort to selectively meet my virtual braintrust face-to-face, when possible. Remembering that we interact with actual people, even if the online personalities are often distanced and/or unreal. Converting a friendly online voice into a friend. I can’t do it every day, but it’s something to aspire to.
Monday, August 23 at 11:48am
i find the access to so much new information and/or ideas to be nothing short of inspiring and oh-so-liberating. i’ve never had a problem expressing myself, and have been fortunate enough to find my way into a field that welcomes creativity (writing/producing) — but thanks to the variety of interesting and/or informative websites i’m able to visit, my horizons have broadened more than i imagined possible a mere decade ago.
that said, i am surely careful about where i go and/or with whom i share info, Shirley. but even the challenge of “preserving my identity” and/or “maintaining privacy” is entertaining — perhaps as an extension of my appreciation for a good mystery and/or puzzle? your guess is as good as mine… : )
Monday, August 23 at 12:24pm
Being able to view other artists’ work online has a similar impact on me as visiting art and craft shows: It gives me ideas, gets my creative juices flowing, makes me think of new ways to use old materials. Of course, I realize that I am limited by not being able to examine a work from all angles, not being able to touch a piece or talk to the artist, as I can at a show, so there are limits as to what the internet does for me. Nonetheless, I am grateful for the images (and sounds in recordings or video) that allow me to sample the ideas of other artists so frequently, and at comparatively little expense.
Monday, August 23 at 1:29pm
I think Creating with the consumption of your product / the audience / the network in mind can be a distraction. User-centricity is great for Design but not necessarily all forms of art/creation. The network can be a collaborative tool, sure – and a source of inspiration, research. But I’m not sure how the concept of Network is more useful to the Creator than the old stodgy notion of the Collective Unconscious, which is a much more forgiving source of inspiration. The underlying patterns and rhythms that provide commonality in our creative work should be accessed easily *without* the aid of the Network. Furthermore the ever-expanding panoptic Network puts an undue focus on our own individuality, as we set ourselves up in relationship/opposition to it. I think one could argue that these are traps to be wary of.
Monday, August 23 at 1:50pm
Two words come to mind – collaboration and validity. The age of the network is allowing more collaboration. This collaboration fosters knowledge through creativity. Many technologies that have emerged from this include Second Life. The eye-in-hand symbol and icon of Second Life is known through many cultures as “knowledge through creativity.” This, perhaps, may even symbolize this unbelievable age we are in which inn ovation will be driven by creativity; whereas creativity is driven by a collaborative environment. Validity is the second word that come to mind because the dissemination of information is easy to do for anyone. Unfortunately, this includes mis-information. Luckily, the collaborative aspect could help insure that information is valid. Wikipedia is a good example of this phenomenon when the accuracy of this site rivals Encyclopedia Britannica. Why? Because of Collaboration and it is up to each of us to insure of information validity. We are entering an Age of Reckoning where these accounts will balance out or not.
Monday, August 23 at 2:03pm
At first, it was very motivating. It was great to do things as a group as opposed to individually. It provided accountability and encouragement.
Unfortunately, I have become very addicted to the immediate gratification of network and now found it difficult to feel free creatively without expecting some sort of reaction quickly.
I’m trying to break myself of this almost narcissistic need for constant affirmation and immediate response by participating in network-based projects less. It’s almost like if I get the immediate gratification through some online group projects, I become impotent with my own projects which do not provide the same quick-and-dirty responses.
I’m not sure if this is what you were looking for?
Monday, August 23 at 2:24pm
I agree with several people here who mentioned the increased access to inspiration. There is more input before we output, and this allows for more cross-analysis in the creative process. But with almost universal access to the network, the broadened creative pool is also more crowded.
This affects individuality. Most creatives want to seem unique. Uniqueness is valued and it grabs attention. But now we can immediately find similarities with others, so we form subcultures of creators and viewers with increasing frequency. The shelf life of uniqueness plummets, and the arms race of novelty snowballs with more work and more criticism.
Personally, I look at my old artwork before the internet and it seems wonderfully naive and honest. Then I found Designgraphik, TrueIsTrue, Prate, and others in the online art scene and it blew my mind. It influenced me significantly, and while my work became more cultured and mature it lost some individuality.
Could an artist like Henry Darger exist today? Instead we have vast art communities where more people create a wider range of work in a hive system. Ultimately I think we are more aggregatively creative as a network, but less individually unique in our process.
Monday, August 23 at 9:16pm
thanks clint –
i wonder – are individuality and uniqueness often thought of as the same thing? if they aren’t, then what is individuality? especially when it comes to being creative and struggling to find a voice.
i’m getting a bit abstract, and i don’t really want to get into a conversation about definitions – but i know that nestled somewhere inside my understanding of creativity is something about striving to become more unique – and that is starting to feel nearly impossible.
feels more like a marketing challenge now. to appear more unique. or just to appear more so that all other instances seem like copies of your original.
so as a student – what is your strategy? cultured and mature or wonderful and honest (your words not mine)?
Tuesday, August 24 at 4:33pm
I’m using “individual” as a universal characteristic, meaning we’re all individuals doing our own thing. And by “unique” I mean the scale of commonality we have with other individuals. So I’d argue Animal Collective is a pretty unique band, while Coldplay isn’t as much, just by how similar they sound to others.
Regarding uniqueness and marketing, I hear ya, man. For me, it feels like growing up a bit… I’m outgrowing the teenage angst and cynicism and trying to be more of a positive thinker. Trying, anyway.
As a student, I’m still wandering through that strategy. We’re in a small group at school and I try to find “unique” projects that are interesting to me while avoiding the low-hanging fruit for ideas. But when I see similar projects at other schools, or find businesses and services along the lines of what I came up with, I can’t help but feel unoriginal. The horror!
Something interesting about the network is that once you’re a part of it, you can’t unlearn the influences. I don’t think I can open a sketchbook and draw on a whim anymore. Maybe it’s a phase, but I’m always admiring Klee, Kandinsky, Hokusai, etc. who have perfected aesthetics I tickle.
So I’m not sure uniquely wonderful and honest is possible anymore, by my self-definition. And I think I’m learning to accept that. We’ve all read enough psychology to know chasing success doesn’t bring happiness, and instead we should just gratefully like what we like and make what we make. I think Mark’s comment below is a great stance, but I don’t know if that comes instinctually.
It’s easier as a designer, where your work has somewhat quantifiable results. Cultured and mature output makes me a more experienced designer, but I think artists who yearn to seem unique to themselves and others have a harder time.
Wednesday, August 25 at 12:04am
Sometimes I feel like a shark that’s just sniffed a molecule of blood in the water.
The exposure and absorption of abundant amounts of information help feed creativity. On the other hand, if I’m tired, lazy, or lack defenses, it can easily reduce my individuality. Just another bloody fish.
Monday, August 23 at 11:23pm
The network allows me to connect with more inspiring work in a year than I would ever come across in my lifetime otherwise.
The network lets me connect with my friends in real time, anywhere, no matter how far-flung they are. When I graduated college, the vast majority of my friends left town – but we can still keep track of each other’s lives as they unfold.
I feel a lot more individual, because being on the Internet is a solitary act: you usually don’t have somebody sitting next to you. But I also don’t feel very alone, and that’s comforting.
Tuesday, August 24 at 10:33am
forgive my lower caps and rushed sentences. i’m late for my dentist. but he keeps me waiting and i hate his choice in art.
i asked the question because sometimes i feel like we (all of us) are waking up out of a dream. i’m struggling with how to say this clearly. so i’ll just write – gnarly mistakes and all.
i look at patterns quite a bit. patterns in my traffic, responses to projects, patterns shown to me on political websites, in books on how we behave irrationally, on how we behave like ants.
i look at the way that wealth and power tend towards a certain distribution. then i see that the same rule dictates the frequency of earthquakes by magnitude, distribution of twitter accounts by number of followers, and so on.
and i wonder about all the forces that push things into patterned shapes, and how some patterns are impossible to see if you don’t have enough or the right kind of data or the right kind of tools to sort through the muck. but once you see them they are so big and so obvious. and i wonder about all the ones we can’t see.
sometimes when i see the traffic to a site start to spike, and i read the emails or comments that follow, i feel like i am catching a glimpse of something underneath the data. like i’m getting to see the true(er) shape of the network. and it is a strange amorphous, twisting thing that you can’t describe with the words we use to describe a kitten or a movie.
the dream that i feel like i am waking from is a dream about people being responsible for the shape of things. great people with great ideas that lived great lives. great individuals that have struggled and persevered. on purpose. maybe i feel like i have been trying very hard to live my life on purpose.
what are we waking up into? i don’t know. the gunk hasn’t been wiped from my eyes yet, and to be honest i’m a little afraid to look even if i knew what to look for. but i feel like somewhere in data of 500 million people using facebook there is the shape of a God and it doesn’t look like a person at all.
now i have to go see a man about a tooth.
Tuesday, August 24 at 5:51pm
It’s interesting that you speak of a ‘dream about people being responsible for the shape of things’. As I understand it, people are responsible for things only insofar as they are responsible to each other, as our ethical systems are exclusively self-referential, even when they attempt an aesthetic of impartiality (the so-called deep ecology movement). The shapes of things seem to reify themselves as resultant from interests that are as often inhuman as they are human. To me, this says that these shapes would occur anyway, or at the very least, that the human collective creates shapes unconsciously in ways that no panel of conscious human beings would choose to create.
The idea of individual creativity seems to be important for us to accomplish anything collectively, but so many brilliant people don’t ‘accomplish’ things in the classical sense, and it’s largely an alignment of history and circumstance. The network does change things a bit, in that it creates a new near-universal medium of creation, expression and inspiration, but this has little to do with the individual, and everything to do with a multitude of connected nodes (humans) who now join up in- as Ze puts it- the shape of a God that doesn’t look like a person at all.
Tuesday, August 24 at 7:15pm
I struggle with “drive” so it is hard for me to fully imagine your revelation.
Does just doing and being preclude living purposefully?
I don’t really believe in divine purpose or a god directing things, so it is difficult for me to imagine a mass “waking”. It presumes too much intent?
(To be honest, this is an area where I am somewhat/very close minded. I ‘deny’ the existence of a greater purpose partly because the thought of it makes me incredibly uncomfortable.)
Are you suggesting that there is some sort of divine order involved in this awakening? Why is it a god? This seems to suggest some sort of universal consciousness that would explain recurring patterns. If that is the case, is this really something new when this thought has recurred in mythology for a very long time?
To an extent, creativity is borne both out of necessity/survival and out of the riches/excess. I assume that the results of these types of creativity have hallmarks… patterns?
I don’t know what I’m talking about but I’ll post this anyway.
Tuesday, August 24 at 7:58pm
Mark gave the Final Word
I tend to search for puns before I make them online, sometimes finding delightedly that they have been made before. That feeling of ‘I wonder if somebody has done THIS’ coupled with the sense that yes, other people have made the joke; or conversely, Google can’t find one and I feel like I am king of that joke.
So while ‘drop a beet’ is a popular hiphop/sugar pun, ‘military coop’ is just a popular misspelling; not a lot of people talking about a hostile army of chickens.
But I humungously digress.
Sometimes the network intimidates. Lets you find the people who are better than you at what you do, and younger, and more successful. And it can make you want to give up or feel that you have to find a niche, and that it’s going to be a crappy niche because the good niches are already taken. You can wind up feeling late to the party (like I’m late to this discussion).
But more often it’s a source of joy, and fun, and feeling of connection that the 50 people who like something it the world can find each other. Mainly because it’s not just a big series of random pages and people, it’s filterable, we can all find our own Internet. And you can so easily be brought out of your domain, you’re only a click away from things you would never come across in normal like. Through sites like TED and Ze’s and Tumblr and Reddit I’ve come across things that inform the way I think, and help me with my creative work on a daily basis.
Individuality is a bit of a red herring. We’ve all got that. The network can bring us face to face with ways in which we aren’t unique, much more easily than it can show us how we are. It can make you feel like you don’t have anything to add, and that even if you did it’s a cacophony anyway, who would listen? But it’s not one big cacophony, it’s lots of small bands playing at once, and you can tune in to the ones you like.
All this repeats the first half. I suppose what’s important is that you can willfully stick your head into this whole online world, and that’s new. You can plunge in and out. You can save weeks of thinking by figuring out where a discourse on a topic is in a day, come across the stages you might have gone through.
As individuals, we become strange repositories of many different kinds of information, each of us is a unique experiment into the results of the forces we ingest throughout our lives; the network throws in some wildcards.
Tuesday, August 24 at 9:01pm
Some thoughts:
Most people in this discussion feel the network inspires them creatively, allows them to find information and inspiration. It seems like what we’re talking about is access and access is vastly improved. At the same time, we research the largest open monopoly of information of our time, Google. The speed in which we can do inspiration getting and discovery is significant. Faster, potentially less expensive, easier, more common (curious to see in numbers about online use versus the reach of earlier media.. shouldn’t be that hard to track down, right? :)).
I’m glad Paul Soulellis talked about online personalities. I’m really interested in how the network does/doesn’t reflect physical society. Also, the interpersonal connections (friendship or creativity/individuality based per this discussion theme) are fascinating. I love Twitter and links and new things. I’m ok with Facebook, but it sometimes leaves me feeling wanting for actually seeing those people realtime. Engaging in these things can be an outlet to express creativity and individuality.
But maybe all of this stuff about sharing is pretty primitive. And the potential for collaboration could almost look underexplored. I’m hopefully for new technology to go further, mobile seems barely tapped on the kinds of collaboration Chirstopher pointed out. Ways to harness patterns of interest between people.
Speaking of patterns, the network is all about sorting and filtering and that does require individual participation. Has the network made us lazy? I feel like you can’t approach it passively. Does this mean we have to look harder or work differently? I don’t know. Maybe Darger’s experience was sort of a fluke anyways. But I do know that if the network leaves you feeling like it’s all been done before, look further! We are all indivduals and you can chose to express uniqueness. Or not. Everything has influences, references, go forth and find!
I’m also really interested in how our current digital time does not differ from, say, the industrial revolution or the dawn TV. What are ways in which human tastes, needs, desires haven’t changed? In recent years there’s been misty eyes over the loss of communal experience but there’s also ways in which we’ve sought those experiences out anyways as ‘fragmented’ as everything is thought to be. (Catch me on another day..there’s truth to that too.)
Immediate gratification, patience, narcissism. Does the internet make people narcissistic or just make it more visible? How much of narcissism is very human self-assertion?
I followed some(ha!) of the recent attention span debate here and there (see Rushkoff,Shirky,etc.). I tire of some of the ‘unplug’ advocates. Maybe I feel like I still know how to and I trust (too much?) my ability to focus. Still beats being covered in coal dust in London 1850. Facebook, right? Some very sensible people have said, no really, you really can just turn it off.
The online world is kind of an illusion of total access and control. ‘Everyone can’ doesn’t mean ‘everyone will’ and there are people how question the internet’s reach. Also, there are outlets will pattern-make and filter for you. We have this medium that we think of as universal and yet major news outlets in the US (TV/internet) are reporting much less foreign news than 10 years ago, 20 years ago. That could seem counter-intuitive.
So if the internet is maybe not a universal experience, it’s still about human differences, choices, tastes, decision-making.
Clint, I love your Henry Darger example. Now we have outsider artists with gallery representation (though we’ve always had folk arts). I don’t think Henry Darger would happen in the same way again but I think it could happen again… it would just look different. If Darger were alive today he’d be looking up little girls and magazines online. Darger was all about media. He loved old magazines, printed pictures. In his own head, but filled with external imagery. Most of us use the internet alone in our rooms. The more I think about it, the more I can imagine Darger with an email address and no contact with the comtemporary art world. Darger, I felt at least, make work for himself, because he loved it. I’m not sure he understood his connection or relevance or how history would freak out after his death. His work was for himself? Darger doing the same deal with an email address. And not on Facebook.
Friday, August 27 at 2:36pm
Ana P. Castro
0
There are those perfect instants, where exposed to the network, my mind becomes unstoppable. Its imperative scrutiny leads to almost unintentional analysis of information. Those everlasting synapses allow me to associate new pieces of information, interpret them and transform them into very useful experiences I would not get from other sources. Every bit of information is crucial, tab, after tab, i find my browser crashing on me all the time. The network allows me to explore and discover new ideas and concepts, that cannot easily be obtained from society and its tribalism, so it helps overcome barriers and really open the mind to express who i am as an individual through self creation and experimentation.
Monday, August 23 at 11:48am