This week at a National Science Foundation sponsored meeting on Creativity in Washington DC, I got to my hotel room and pulled out my computer to connect to the network. Maybe I've been lucky, but I haven't used a dialup in ages. But suddenly I was faced with this prospect as my room neither had an overpriced broadband connection, nor did it have wireless access. I could be neither wired, nor wireless. And it wasn't just me. Picture a whole meeting room full of elite computer people that were placed in the same dire situation. With the meeting's central topic of creativity and computing, the irony of it all seemed as if it were made for TV.
Does a computer become less an instrument of creativity without the network? I'm pretty sure. That is, if you equate the network with some combination of a close-to-infinite set of resources or access to people. You get so much stuff "for free" when you are connected to the network. You also pay the price of having simply too much stuff to look at and experience and it can really defocus you if you are not careful. I am thankful that there are only a few Quicktime trailers released a month to distract me from my work at hand otherwise I wouldn't be able to get anything done.
To me, creativity is a combination of defocus and focus. Without the defocusing phase, you would be too clear as to what to achieve; without the focus, you would never execute anything in your life. Doing stuff. Thinking about stuff. The cycle continues. Do for too long, or think for too long, and you can easily get stuck.
Celebrated author Richard Florida of Creative Class fame came to speak at the meeting's celebratory dinner. Extremely sharp (and also very tan), Florida exhorted his ongoing message of how creativity is becoming the last frontier whereby advanced nations hold the lead. Creativity is in danger of being outsourced, and is in part already beginning to become outsourced, however the US can strengthen its lead in this area with strategic investments for the nation's future. If I were a politician, I would certainly have beat my hawkish chest and jumped on the bandwagon of protectionism. But I'm thankfully not a politican.
Creativity is part of the human condition. I don't think that any nation is particularly more creative than another just because one might be more developed. If you think that having Hollywood in California is a sign of the creative might of the US, if you see a lot of movies coming out of the Hollywood factories you would recognize that production values tend to be high, but actual creativity is very low. One of my favorite movies is a silly movie called Galaxy Quest. The plotline is fairly simple. Actors in an SF television show are mistaken for real space explorers by a group of aliens that need their help. The actors naturally fail when they try to help the aliens, and when all seems lost, the actors somehow triumph in the end. One of my former students, Tom White, pointed out that this movie has the exact same plot as A Bug's Life and an older movie, Three Amigos. Since all three movies share identical plot lines, I can say that they lack creativity. That's not fair. What's better to say is that they lack originality.
In the past I tended to equate creativity with originality. I think I still definitely appreciate something original more than something that is just creative. Yet I realize now that in life if you expect yourself to be entirely original, and you refuse to do something just because you know that someone else has done it ... you really should just stay in bed for the rest of your life. Because everything has been done already. Walk into a library and immediately you sense centuries of knowledge around you. What's the point, really, of writing another book or writing another sentence? There seems to be more than enough books and sentence out there. But we all try. I try. Now back to do.
Posted by maeda at June 18, 2005 10:33 AM