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Facilitating the creative citizen

By John Hartley - posted Monday, 23 October 2006


Of course the “effects of television” are often discussed, as long as we confine the topic to negative effects on vulnerable demographics.

One “effect” that has been missed is that TV seems to have caused our cultural thought-leaders to abandon all hope for the integration of creativity and scale in contemporary societies - to give up on the idea that great art needs great audiences.

So little do we believe in the critical and creative capacities of our own fellow citizens that it seems almost natural to assume that quality and popularity are mutually exclusive. Over here we have individual creative talent; over there we have industrial scale. Ne’er the twain shall meet.

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Consumer co-creation and user-led innovation (creative human capital)

Except that now they have. And this is the challenge for all those who have despaired for individual creative quality in the age of broadcast entertainment. Over the last decade, and at an increasing rate, it has become possible to do something about it. The developed world is witnessing a shift from representations “of” and “for the people” to those “by the people”.

Television is heading into a post-broadcast phase of interactive innovation and do-it-yourself production, brought on by the coming-of-age of the Internet, which combines individual creative content and global scale in a way that was hardly thinkable in the broadcast era.

The Internet probably isn’t quite as popular as TV yet, but its scale is remarkable, as is the shift of emphasis from producer to consumer or user. Now “popular scale” doesn’t just mean that everyone can be part of the same audience, but also that everyone can create their own work and publish it, via MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and other platforms.

While most such work is circulated among small groups or communities of interest, the potential is always there for someone’s bright idea, performance or personal charm to win an audience of millions - it happens regularly.

In other words, as has been the case with popular music since the blues, ordinary people can mix personal identity, performance and politics in one two-minute clip and share it with the world. And they do - by the tens of million.

In response we must urgently revise our understanding of individual creativity to match the “industry scale” on which it can now be deployed. In particular, we need to revise the broadcast model of creativity which reserves all the talent to the professionals - artists, performers, entertainers - and leaves the general public sprawled brainlessly on the couch. The division of labour between producers and consumers is undergoing radical change as we speak.

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Digital interactive technology allows non-professionals and ordinary consumers to engage in creative innovation, ranging from the open source movement (for example, Linux) to digital storytelling.

Some of what they do remains at the level of self-expression, which sustains important enterprises like YouTube, deviantART.com, Flickr, FaceBook or MySpace and many others. Elsewhere consumer innovation may feed back into further commercial development as happens in evolving computer-game content.

As broadband access extends, consumer or user creativity is emerging as the most dynamic source of innovation - blogging, the Wikipedia, citizen journalism. New forms of open network relationship have evolved to connect co-creators and to encourage a much broader social base for creative inputs.

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This is an edited extract from John Hartley’s Keynote Address to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Research (AoIR), held in Brisbane on September 27-30, 2006.



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About the Author

John Hartley is an ARC Federation Fellow and research director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. He is the author and editor of many books and articles in the field of cultural, media and journalism studies, including Creative Industries (published by Blackwell, Oxford, 2005).

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