Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
According to this Newsweek article, as Americans are becoming know-it-all smarty-pants, they are also becoming less and less creative. Here’s the definition of creativity given by the article, which strikes me as clinical, incomplete and arbitrary, but at least notes the importance of critical thinking in the creative process:
The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful... There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).
The most dramatic drops in creativity are among grade school students—kids that were born in the late 1990s. In fact, until 1990, the population's creativity and intelligence were increasing together at a steady rate—but in the nineties, as intelligence continued its upward trend, the population declined in creativity.
And no wonder. The nineties was a decade when internet use was replacing friendship. New and improved Nintendo systems made social rejects cool—as did the cleverly named and hand-held Game Boys. Meanwhile, in-car DVD players, along with iPods and cell phones, were just around the corner, and are today tethered to the hands and ears of most tweens, teens and aging wannabes.
When I was in high school, during my pre-iPod days, I always had a CD or the radio on. At the time, my dad commented on my music addiction by pointing out, much to my displeasure, something G.K Chesterton once said. Chesterton said that people who listen to music excessively are afraid of their own thoughts.
Maybe the same can be said of people who hide within their gadgets and headphones—their personal, insulated worlds. How can kids be expected to think creatively when they can totally escape their own thoughts and lose themselves in a world of alternate realities—realities that are created and creative for them? When their greatest adventures require no more than the companionship afforded by a laptop computer?
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Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
I always thought the most productive period for creativity was "alone time." Alone in your room or in your car; alone with your thoughts and your ideas. It's all gone. Our current generation is never alone. Facebook, Twitter, IMs, iPhone, chat rooms, email; they are always connected to someone. Creativity by committee is a rarity.
Jul '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
The issue I am always trying to extract from my thoughts when I think about things along the lines in this post is: "how much am I idealizing the past and downplaying the advantages of the present ?" It's easy to feel that civilization is on a downward slide. Most days I'd be arguing on that side of the argument, but in many ways the world does seem to keep improving.
And if it is getting worse, we just need one last good generation of creative people to program the computers who can keep being creative for us in the future, right ?
Jun '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
The first step in creating art (or gadgets,) is loving art (or gadgets.) Musicians often talk about what their parents listened to for fun, and how that music inspired them to imitate and improvise on that music, starting as a kid. Every fiction writer seems to start off as an insatiable reader, parents usually getting them started by loving books themselves. And the same goes for tinkering. There probably wasn't a more inventive time in America, just in volume of new gadgets, than the early 1900s. You had all these young men, fresh from designing their own labor saving devices on the family farm, all thrown together in a World War, where all kinds of new inventions were needed to help them stay alive. The family farm, the isolated farm, was probably the perfect environment to tinker with labor-saving devices. Months went by with nothing much happening, you had time to think and doodle, and then all of a sudden it's harvest time and there aren't enough hours in the day. Working on farms was always a great recipe for invention, because the alternative was working yourself to death.
May '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
I agree, Pat, though I would describe the problem differently: noise.
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
I disagree, Pat: there is creativity by committee, at least for kids. My daughter (10 yrs old) has a passion for drawing and storytelling, and loves to spend time on a site where kids can draw their characters and IM ongoing impromptu plots. She has a YouTube site built around her stories and animations, and has 100s of subscribers offering feedback. Me, I had comic books - and maybe one friend who was interested in the same stories.
That said: we are in a remix culture now, which allows for a different kind of creativity - it still requires people to produce new ideas, but expands the # of people who can be considered "creative." There's more convergence / divergence going on now. There will always be a great lowing herd of people who just consume, but computers have provided tools for a new generation to recreate what someone else created. This is widespread, and unprecedented in popular culture.
Jun '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
I still think the most radical solutions, the freshest insights, come from the wonderfully mutant brain cells of just one person--not five or ten. The committee might be good at conforming a brainstorm to reality, but probably not so good at coming up with the brainstorm in the first place.
May '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
Clay Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus, offers a forceful rebuttal. I'm going to grossly oversimplify his thesis, but for our purposes, it's enough: people used to spend lots of time watching TV, but now that we have the Internet, lots of that time is spent on creative, productive work -- everything from commenting here on Ricochet to writing blog posts to creating Web videos to coding innovative new Web sites to creating Wikipedia pages to writing captions on silly sites dedicated to cats.
Incidentally, Mr. Lileks is a great example of this. His sprawling Web site is a delightful product of countless hours and years of creative thought.
Jul '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
You can't teach creativity, but you can set up the environment to hone the skills needed for creativity to express itself. That is what is missing and Mrs.Smith has this correct. We are too busy and self absorbed in non-relationship interactions that those creative skills are not flourishing.
May '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
An anecdote from my weekend: My daughter's friend and a boy from nearby are interested in each other. They have been texting and chatting on Facebook for a couple of weeks, making plans to get together. All weekend they were in the same place, sometimes fifteen feet apart, but neither of them could muster up the courage to actually speak to the other. Are kids today unable to interact face to face? Are computers and phones becoming barriers? Protective walls? Smile. Wave. Do something to break the ice. Each of them seemed terrified. Or maybe it's just being a teenager.
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
Here's Alan Jacobs:
Though I agree with Alan, mediated play is managed play. The awkwardness of 'interacting' with strangers is natural. Culture can only overcome it -- and the pathological relationships of use and abuse it spawns -- face-to-face, in unmediated reality.
May '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
I think Newsweek self-diagnoses its demise. Being neither original nor useful, it is up for bids.
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
On the social front at least, let me offer a couple of rays of hope. My younger son enjoys playing Xbox games over the Internet. His teammates are friends he knows from church and a New Hampshire summer camp. Distance is no barrier: some players are across town, a couple more live thousands of miles away. While playing the game, the players chat on a private audio link about school, girls, possible college majors -- the entire gamut of teen concerns. Meanwhile, my older son connects with friends all over the world via two-way video over iChat. I recently saw him walking around the house, alone, describing the rooms. It all made sense when I noticed the laptop cradled in his arm, the built-in camera angled for the benefit of his distant friend.
Make no mistake: I would prefer my sons to read more books, but they are not suffering from a lack of human interaction.
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
When I was in college at Dartmouth, specifically writing for The Dartmouth Review, the late James Freedman--a former Dartmouth president--was the butt of a lot of jokes around the paper's office because of his take on creativity.
Freedman thought that the ideal Dartmouth student should be a "creative loner," translating the Latin versus of Catullus--Catullus!--in the library's pretentiously ornate tower room. That was a bit of a stretch at a school where posters of Animal House's Bluto chugging a fifth adorned many dorm room walls.
While I agree with Pat that "creativity by committee" is a contradiction-in-terms, I also recoil at the idea of creative loners stowing themselves away from society rather than acquiring the tools of creativity--wisdom, experience, etc--by living life!
May '10
Re: Is Creativity Dying in Our Society?
Each has its place. As a musician and songwriter, I've worked along and worked as part of a band. A band is a wondrous experience. The style of what I do on my own instrument necessarily adapts to what my bandmates do. They draw things out of me that would otherwise remain hidden from myself. But I could never stomach working only with a band!
Some of my favorite books were co-authored. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child write together from opposite sides of the country! I don't know how they do it, but it works.
Either way, it's a tradeoff. Solitude has its costs. I taught myself to create and perform music. I've never listened to the radio much and have only been to a handful of concerts. In other words, I fit the stereotype of a reclusive artist. That seclusion has led to both originality and protection from neophilia, but it limits me in other ways. Co-creators are often inspirational.