How does exposure to the network impact the way you think about creativity and individuality?

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