The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines creativity as “the ability to make new things or think of new ideas.” So in the age of computers what does it mean to be creative? Does making a YouTube video classify you as creative? Does using Photoshop or editing software to do something unique to a photo mean that you are creative? Where does blogging fall in the realm of creativity? These questions affect us all on a daily basis. It is easier for “Digital Natives” to be creative than any other generation before. The formality of being able to get your creative work to the masses has dissolved.
Take writing for example; being a writer in the nineteenth and twentieth century was hard work. An aspiring writer had to write their manuscript, most of the time by hand, and then take it to a publisher. The publisher then got to decide whether or not your work was worth being published. All of the books you see in bookstores still follow this convention, but eBooks are now an entirely different story. Barnes and Noble have come out with a free service called PubIt! This essentially eliminates the middleman. The idea is that you can log into this web portal and self publish your work and sell it in their eBook store. This is a prime example of how the digital world has lowered the barriers of creativity. You could also look at this with regards to the music industry and YouTube. So, are we more creative than the generations before us or are there simply less obstacles in our way?
Sources:
http://youthandmedia.org/wiki/Portal:Digital_Creativity
I personally think that creativity can be done in any century. Youtube and Barnes and Noble just make it easier for the creative people out there to share their stuff with the world. I guess you are right in the sense that it was harder to be creative back in the day but that is because trying to get something published or seen by people was harder than now-a-days. But this is a good point because being creative also meant trying to figure out how to get the public to see what that person had created.
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