Home »

Platform for Creativity

Posted by Stuart at 01:57 PM on January 27, 2004

Lately, I have been doing a lot of reading on the Internet about technology and culture and education. It started as a search for graduate schools in educational technology, but of course education and technology both have enormous effects on culture and society, and visa versa.

It seems like a good time to start reading about technology and culture again. For a while, after the dot-com bust, there was a lot of pessimism about technology and the it's influence on our lives. But now the economy seems to be turning around a bit, and the visionaries and dreamers and revolutionaries are starting to find their audience again.

The more I read about Open Source and Peer-to-Peer I get very excited about it's potential, especially for developing countries like Thailand. For example, I just read an interesting article on OpenP2P.com called Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive and People's Technology. In it, Mr Kahle talks about his projects to archive the ever-changing Internet and to blanket San Francisco in a wireless network. Both are couched in his grand vision for "Universal Access to All Human Knowledge." Wow. Visions don't get much grander than that!

But my favorite quote in the article tells of his overarching vision of the future:

What I'd really like to see is a world where there's no limitations on getting your creative ideas out there. That people have a platform to find their natural audience. Whether their natural audience is one person, themselves, or a hundred people, or a thousand people. Try to make it so the technologies that we develop, and the institutions we develop, make it so that people have an opportunity to flower. To live a satisfying life by providing things to others that they appreciate.

Sounds kind of like this website. This website is my creative "platform that seeks its natural audience." If I am the only person who reads it, I am still satisfied. It fulfills its purpose; it allows me to practice my writing and practice taking and editing photographs. To know that others visit it every now and then (Hi Mom!) and even get some enjoyment out of it makes it even better.

I do see the world moving this way. Hopefully the powers-that-be won't stiffle this movement with copyright battles. But it's becoming increasingly easy to see a new creative future. Want to be a musician? Buy a Mac with GarageBand, create your own music and distribute it through the network. Want to make money? Then charge for your music. Want to just be an artist for your own purposes? Then give away the music for free.

If you are a consumer, there will be tools to find the artists that you like, instead of being force-fed "Top" 40 crap on every radio station on the planet. I hope that we can move to a world where we don't need monopolizing record companies (or publishing houses, for that matter) who control creativity and content and tell us what is good for us.

Can you imagine?