In The saddest music in the world, Jeffrey Zeldman, bemoans dashed dreams of “an era of limitless creativity”:
The illusion that the web would usher in a new era of limitless creativity can now be put away with the rest of the broken toys.I think Mr. Zeldman is giving up too soon, too easily. There's no way that “every person” is going to be an “inventor and publisher”. Forget it. Just because we've fallen short doesn't mean we've failed.
I've been heartened by the growth of what has been called the “creative class” and the “cultural creatives”. Florida's book The Rise of the Creative Class chronicles a major shift in modern Western culture. We've seen some of these people before: the Romantics (Blake, Thoreau, Emerson), Bohemians (Gertrude Stein, et al.), Beatniks, Hippies and the Counter Culture. The good news is that the numbers have steadily risen.
The creative class is counted in some circles as already exceeding 25% in the US. It's no longer a fringe thing. I gotta believe that the bloggers, gmailers and friendsters that Zeldman talks about are members of this emerging group. This group is big and growing in a bottom-up way in the midst of a commercialized, “what's your business model” world.
My main point is that we are in the early stages of a good, good thing. Putting digital tools in the hands of *the masses* is spawning all sorts of creators (garage bands, bloggers, wikians, forum posters, emailers, eziners, programmers, scripters and webmasters).
We are not in a mature situation here. All of these new media are being created, picked up and dabbled with by often passionate amateurs in their scarce spare time. People are seeking connection and self-expression. Not necessarily the highest levels of skill, mastery, art and aesthetics.
Let me take a couple examples: blogs and Friendster. Take Friendster. It's already on the wane. As far as I know all these new social networking services are on the wane. These are just ideas thrown against the wall of human curiosity and sociability.
There's not much to do on these Friendsters. I think there's a lot more to do in the way of collaboration, mutual support, conversation, co-creation, presence and social organization. But it's trapped up in the Friendsters. Little commercial undertakings that aren't making money but strive to and are slanted towards making a quick buck or making sense to venture capitalists. It hasn't been long, but the concensus seems to be developing that all these little clusters of services and features need to be available across the web not turned inward into little homogeneous communities.
Blogging. This medium has emerged as one of casual, quick, self-expression. The blogging phenomenon stands on the shoulders of its forebears: forums, email, newsgroups, listserves, ezines. Add in websites and you get blogs. Personal websites with quick posts and comments. No, Shakespeare has not yet been reborn as a blogger. That's not blogging style. It's not the weighty medium of the major artist. It's the casual personal journal and low-strength citizen journalism of you or me or all the other gifted adults and teens and sometimes children out there.
If you are looking to be blown away or astounded by virtuosity, the new web may not be where you should be looking. There are plenty of artists around in all these media. You just won't suddenly find that everyone has the temperament for full-on artistic or intellectual virtuosity. They are out working and de-stressing. Many of them are creating. Who knows what's next. WAAAY to early to give up yet.
The question is: can crass materialism and corporate business models lure the artists and inventors away or lure the not-so-common man or woman back to the easy ways of passive consumerism? Of course. Whenever you are stressed to the max, the easy way beckons loudly and enticingly.
Luckily all these fun new tools like wikis and blogs and interesting combo products like ecto, NetNewsWire, Shadow Plan and the rest lure us into meaningful connections, expressions and experiments. Yes. If you measure it all against an ideal. It sucks. But, hey, it's moving in the right direction. I'm impressed with the resilience and experimentation we've seen in the face of the dotcom crash, 9/11, a repressive and war-mongering US administration, continued trashing of the environment and natural resources, starvation and AIDs.
Massive numbers of Net-empowered nerds, next-door-neighbors, employees, entrepreneurs and amateurs - operating in a chaotic but self-organizing way - give me hope.
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