As well as gushing over this outcome, let’s also think about how it relates to purpose. Traditionally creativity has served a number of masters – memory and collective memorial being two, pleasure being another.
What purpose is the current rash of creativity serving? I don’t want to make a moral judgment condemning it for serving no purpose but I do want to understand if the sense of purpose is reduced or enhanced by it.
As far as I can see the content industries have broken the link between creativity and memorial across most forms of creative expression. User generated content resembles reality TV in that it provides a succession of symbolic moments, none of which are particularly real, cumulative or serving a purpose outside themselves.
Like soap operas which focus in, repetitively, on a small number of emotions expressed in clichéd situations, reality TV focuses in on emotive decision points. We have drama without any real reason for it, other than those decision points.
User generated content seems equally adrift from reason and purpose. Or to be generous its purpose is highly individual. It does not serve memory, or a collective memorial process, but it does serve the needs of the individual creating it. That is different from past art.
On the one hand there are some great acts out there on the new web, on the other hand you search in vain for a unifying theme. Again I would like to repeat that this could just be the best way to go or the worst way to go.
The most generous comment you can make is that a Long Tail creative economy forces people to connect with their micro-interest group and share meaning there rather than in the broad base that was previously served by drama, comedy, news etc.
What We Know
What we know also changes in the web world, how we know too. It’s been said that the future is search. Search and discovery. We can easily adapt to a world where sinking the deep foundations of knowledge become irrelevant because all is knowable through Google.
“Googlephiliacs are effusive with pledges of faith and trust: "We trust the democratic, bottom-up, blog-building, link-loving nature and integrity of Google's PageRank system" [Morville]. It's a religious thing. It binds us together, they say. "Collectively we believe in Google, it's our memory, it's the way we share." [Winer].” Andrew Orlowski.
We’d be stupid if we did but we can see it happening. At the same time what we know is becoming more determined by the cross-flow of conversations and debate than by either google or libraries and foundations.
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