Here Come The Creators !

I have worked in media all of my adult life - helping to sell it, market it, distribute it and provide systems that support media.  As a result, I have more friends in the creative side of things than many of my friends who have worked in law or medicine or construction or professional ministry.  These friends are often more than a bit freaked out when someone like me - who loves media, owns a ton, has his 401(k) held by media companies - when I talk or post about the death of formats, like CDs or web pages, sermons or even.....books. 

While this may surprise you, I get no joy from freaking people out.  Okay, that is not totally true - I do enjoy the random prank or hack.

But my sense is that we are living in a time when a set of commercial media formats are, at best, maturing; and more likely, they are expiring as a viable way for many to make a living or to impact culture.

That is an opinion.  Mine --- and some other people.

Here is a fact - there are more people creating & distributing media today than last year, 10 years ago or 100 years ago.  This is particularly the case in writing - shifts in culture, identity & technology have translated to an explosion in the number of writers who share what they write.  Rachel Donadio writes about this in a piece from Sunday's NYT You’re an Author? Me Too!:

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles.

University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work.

The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals).

And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

Donadio ends her piece that by observing "In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it."

For many in the elite of mainstream, this explosion is something to make light of, too many people with too much time on their hands.  For people who make their income on these mediums, there is some mix of exhilaration and fear in the incongruent lines of number of readers & number of writers in this image from You’re an Author? Me Too!:

Someone who much smarter than me about all this - Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) - has written a sensational...book....cue the irony.....on this phenomenon called Here Comes Everybody . I love the fact that Shirky popularized the phrase 'the internet runs on love".

He calls the gap between people creating and people interacting cognitive surplus, something that has been building up for more than 50 years.  In his post Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, Shirky contrasts passive mediums (like TV) with interactive or social mediums - even though some of his conclusions can bee seen as the triumph of the new, I suspect he is on target when he suggests that that social or interactive media, however lame or goofy, has an added quality that sitting in front of a box does not.

I am intrigued by one of Shirky's observations about this threshold shift we seem to be in:

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.

That is such a generous phrase - failing informatively.  It is an ethos that is much more prevalent in edge tribes - actors, hackers, artists - than it is in institutions that see themselves as housing power or sitting at the center.

Imagine a group that set as part of it's mission statement to fail informatively, to help mark a path, to blaze a trail.  A trail that may dead end.  A path that may reach a cliff.  Those lessons are likely to persist much longer than the page they are printed on, the wiki they were posted to, even the people who discovered them (again).

In these shifts, the strong forces that try to hold them back, I sense a lot of what people characterize as Postcolonialism, a break from the binding of oppression that has held voice back, that have bounded the sognitive surpus - even made this to look like a creative deficit.  You can see these discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies in battle in our culture, our politics, even our faith communities (especially our faith communities).  This disruption is painful for commerce and institutions, but this surplus is something that excites me with every new voice I hear or read or met.