Online Creativity

Although the apparatus cannot read poetry, it can help write it. Computers and the Internet have allowed for an explosion in new forms of creativity, both individual (as in the sense of just you and your computer) and collaboratively. This new wave is partly facilitated by places online for this creativity and partly due to people hacking into their machines, understanding the way they work and using that knowledge in a creative form. “The phenomenal success of Flickr is one example of programmers socially engaged in technosocial creativity. The programmer/artist has peered inside the ‘black box’ and learned to manipulate it.” (Weight, p.416-417) The apparatus has become a partner in your creative endeavour.

Web 2.0: interactivity, sharing and collaboration on an unprecedented scale. It is everything the Internet was meant for. The active viewer/user. “If amateur photography in the twentieth century was defined by Kodak’s slogan, ‘You push the button, we do the rest’, then the slogan of Web 2.0 models of amateur creativity such as Flickr’s might be, ‘Here are the buttons, you do the rest.’” (Jean Burgess, p.3) New media technologies encourage (or even require) active participation from the user. You create your text/experience rather than reading/seeing/hearing about it in a top down broadcast medium. It is this opportunity to interact and "play" with your text that makes the new technologies exciting, usuable and approachable.