Do you remember the movie What Women Want? The one where Mel Gibson falls in the bathtub, electrocutes himself, and suddenly has the power to hear what women are thinking as they walk by? I remember being really struck by the possibility of someone hearing your thoughts (hey, I was 19). Another caveat: this was back when I, and most others, assumed Mel Gibson had a soul.
Regardless of the silly plot-line (it’s actually a pretty awful movie when I reflect on it now), in some ways it resembles the world we live in today, and how people are increasingly expressing their thoughts in a public forum, definitely in a way that was never previously possible. Is it now: What the world wants? Are we hearing human idea tinkerings that were previously silent? I think this is pretty cool, in fact. I’m discovering there a lot of people out there who have some pretty rad ideas, thought processes, and in general, this makes me conclude we are as a society working out our creative muscles.
Consider this. Ten years ago, when the average person got home from work in the evening and wanted to relax, the delivery of choice for many was the TV. Why? Because this was the only thing we were offered. So, you’d sit there and consume, consume, consume. Now with social media, people ar realizing rather than sitting in front of a uni-directional media box, they can participate. And since we’re social creatures, this is turning out to be way more of a turn on than our former option. Blogs, tweets, Facebook interactions, wikis, and basically online communities of any kind – this is much more our style.
So back to the creative muscle concept. Like all other muscles, I believe creativity is a muscle you work out. Yes, sometimes divine intervention plants an idea in our head regardless of what exercising we were previously doing (perhaps akin to someone never running in their life and then running a sub 3-hour marathon), but for many, the more ideas we participate in, learn from others, the more we become more creative ourselves. Good thing we have sites like the99percent to help us move our creative ideas into actionable results and tangible fruits of labor.
Great thought here, Lauren. I agree with what you say in that social media does open up more avenues and, as we continue to progress into the cyber realms, we are offered more options to interact at greater speeds, with improving high definition clarity and audio (digitized as opposed to analog), and seemingly cheaper rates (remember how much it used to cost for a simple long-distance phone call to-and-from anywhere in the U.S. via land lines?). The creativity potential you mention is virtually limitless. NASA sponsors a Web-based “Design the Future” contest which solicits creative ideas from all sectors of our society to try to make certain aspects of our lives easier, so to speak. You may view this at the following link:
http://contest.techbriefs.com/