The Importance of Creativity Today
For just about everyone, creativity is often viewed in a positively light for various reasons. Businesses want individuals to be creative because creativity can increased profits for a company. Other people want to be around creative individuals because they are an entertaining bunch. Individuals themselves want to be creative because then they will be viewed in a positive light. Being creative has a large amount of positives attached to it, but unfortunately trying to be creative in practice is often as difficult as trying to define creativity!
Even with this difficulty of generating creative thoughts, the opportunity to be creative is all around us in many shapes and forms. To help explain what I mean when I say that opportunity is everywhere, I will be using examples of creativity found in music and examples from the signature of our modern media age to prove my point: our electronics.
Even with this difficulty of generating creative thoughts, the opportunity to be creative is all around us in many shapes and forms. To help explain what I mean when I say that opportunity is everywhere, I will be using examples of creativity found in music and examples from the signature of our modern media age to prove my point: our electronics.
Electronic Opportunity
Since the inception of the internet and the exponential growth of smart phone use over the last decade, the world has become increasingly interconnected. Because of this increased communication, there has been a massive influx of ideas into the marketplace of ideas. New inventions are being made, new apps are being designed, and many feel as thought it has become increasingly harder and harder to be creative in today's society.
To give an example of the difficulty in being creative, let's look at the apps Vine and Snapchat. While both have their individual copyrights and each serves as a specific function, are they really two novel ideas? Both have the ability to send short (less than ten second) clips and post them to your followers. There doesn't seem to be a tangible difference at face value that proves that one app as more creative than the other. However, the opportunity to be creative is still present. The opportunity to be creative doesn't come from the design of the apps themselves, but it instead comes from the users.
I must have seen thousands of snap stories over my time of using Snapchat, and the creativity among them have ranged anywhere from mundane selfies to a friend playing "Under the Sea" on a homemade pan flute. The snapchats themselves provide the opportunity to express creativity, but it is up to the user to make the content of the snapchat novel in ideal, functional through being entertaining, and appealing to the base knowledge of their audience. The opportunity to be creative is still a possibility in the information age, but the opportunity to be drowned out in our interconnected world is just as real of a possibility.
To give an example of the difficulty in being creative, let's look at the apps Vine and Snapchat. While both have their individual copyrights and each serves as a specific function, are they really two novel ideas? Both have the ability to send short (less than ten second) clips and post them to your followers. There doesn't seem to be a tangible difference at face value that proves that one app as more creative than the other. However, the opportunity to be creative is still present. The opportunity to be creative doesn't come from the design of the apps themselves, but it instead comes from the users.
I must have seen thousands of snap stories over my time of using Snapchat, and the creativity among them have ranged anywhere from mundane selfies to a friend playing "Under the Sea" on a homemade pan flute. The snapchats themselves provide the opportunity to express creativity, but it is up to the user to make the content of the snapchat novel in ideal, functional through being entertaining, and appealing to the base knowledge of their audience. The opportunity to be creative is still a possibility in the information age, but the opportunity to be drowned out in our interconnected world is just as real of a possibility.
The Sound of Creativity
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The video to the left if this column is an episode of the Youtube series, "VSauce". In this video the Michael Stevens, discusses the question, "Will we ever run out of new music?" The reason I've decided to put this video on this website is because the video touches on a important point regarding creativity specifically in the last half of the video. The video describes that there are more possibilities of songs than we could ever exhaust, yet we seem to gravitate towards a select few rhythm, chords, and lyrics. Why?
This could be in part because our brain is wired to grow affinity towards songs we already know, but this also is a great modern day example of the creative process. A lot of the time with creativity, there isn't a large life changing shift that switches the way we live life everyday. Similarly, there have been a limited amount of times in the music industry where new styles of music have come out and completely changed the industry. This is because the big changes and breakthroughs of creativity are often rare and far and few between in both the creative process and the music industry, yet society seems to look for theses instances of creativity while disregarding smaller instances of creativity. |
In actuality, creativity is most commonly found in instances of small changes and adaptions instead of groundbreaking moments of inspiration. An example of this in the music industry is when an artists decides to create a new song. The artist doesn't set out trying to make a whole new genre. Instead, they change what music the have heard and alter it to make a new combination of lyrics, melodies, and beats (and thus a new creative product). Another example of this idea of "small" creativity in the music industry comes from the creation of a musical game by three friends Allen, Romain, and Paul. The concept of the game is that you pick and choose prerecorded beats, melodies, and lyrics to create your own individual songs. http://www.incredibox.com/v4/ Now there are, again, technically a finite amount of songs that you can create. Additionally, the song bytes themselves are already prerecorded which doesn't seem like it would leave much of an opportunity to be creative at all. However through your own combination and selection of which beats to use, the experience of making your own "unique" song is still creative. This game fulfills all the main aspects of creativity through being entertaining in functionality, being novel through in which beats and melodies are selected, and calling on one's own intuitive musical ear to fulfill the component of base knowledge on the subject. The website is just another example of how the opportunity to be creative is everywhere and often times overlooked.
Keep Looking for Creativity
The take away from this example is that often times people are too busy looking for the monumental changes and shifts caused by breakthrough creative ideas that they miss the seemingly insignificant (but nonetheless creative) process that is happening in their own everyday lives. Additionally, the need to be creative and unique is especially important today in world with more than eight billion people all striving to be their own individuals. However when one individual is creative, the significance of this feat can take the form of being successful at work, being entertaining on social media, or being a creative in creating a symphony or a song. Necessity is the mother of invention, big or small. All you need to find these creative opportunities is an watchful eye and problem to solve.
In this next section, we will be taking a look at a personal example of an individual whose career depends on creativity.
In this next section, we will be taking a look at a personal example of an individual whose career depends on creativity.