Bounce Your Ideas

Creativity isn’t only bestowed on the wacky musios at college, the paint splattered artists in their garrets, or the ‘I vant to be alone’ thespians. Creativity manifests itself everywhere. Maths, music, physics, poetry, politics, economics, chemistry: creativity is, at its simplest, a different way of looking at or interpreting an accepted norm.

In a recent book by Charles Leadbeater, We-Think examines group creativity that manifests itself via Web 2.0, and the increasing trend for online peer-to-peer interaction. He argues that group collaboration through the ‘open source’ nature of the Internet (which the more fearful among us see as a cacophonous free-for-all) is actually a manifestation of the aural tradition of conversation. And storytelling has been hot-wired into us from the Homeric traditions of ancient civilisation.

But what makes the group mindset found on the Internet, which is so fundamentally creative and productive, so different from the terrifying Stalinist dictatorship of the 20th Century? The warped dream of ‘Socialist Reality’ effectively reduced each Russian citizen to the status of a cog in the mechanical drive towards super industrialisation. And to many ‘Creatives’ caught up in the Communist firestorm, discovered that individual creative thought or any demonstration of talent of the ego was an automatic death sentence.

Communism was imposed from above – people were part of a solution, however a solution that had no degree of collectivisation of thought, focus, structure and vision. People lost their status as people. Thinking was a privilege carried out by ‘Big Brother’ and humanity reduced to a factory spitting out the vision again, and again, and again – identical, fit for purpose – no more, no less.

In stark comparison, ‘We-think-ism’ evolves group collaboration – usually around an initial (however unfinished) concept, challenge, thought or problem. And together, for no reason other than ‘we can’, the amorphous group engages in real-time conversation and collaborates to seek a solution.

Usually these online collectives expect no financial reward, the time frames are not defined, and the original problem continuously evolves into a series of successive challenges. The drive that powers these collaborations is simply being part of a group with a common goal: achieving group recognition and praise, and finding a sweet solution is enough. This life force acts as a virtual magnet that taps into talent, experience and intelligence, and often produces finer work that is far superior to individual or commercial institutions working on similar challenges.

These harmonised groups are not the factory cogs, 9-5ing, clock watching at a desk, working through templated job descriptions, achieving the ticks for the boxes of imposed expectations. Instead, they collaborate in their own time, because it’s exciting, developing, and pushing boundaries of knowledge. This freedom of involved action ensures true creative power – because they can.

Wikipedia is perhaps one of the most famous and successful examples of We-think-ism. It’s an open source project that shows off the Internet at its collaborative, democratic best. Anyone can upload or edit an entry on this advertising-free gem, and the cultural snobbery against its apparent inaccuracy, has been thankfully disproved again and again.

Google recently announced that it’s planning to launch a rival, Google Knol. It will invite people to upload encyclopaedic information, in the same way as Wikipedia, for the one and only advantage of being able to make money through matched Google adverts. These ads will be algorithmically matched, in the hope that information hunters will click through to hunt out consumer goods that they were looking for rather than the definition of life. Knol cynically hopes to manipulate the inherent flaky nature of participants on the web, and take human nature back down to the ground-zero of greed and spend.

However, I wonder, perhaps Google haven’t quite grasped the fundamental point of creativity and collaboration that has been fundamental to the Internet. Wikipedia was not populated to 6 million articles, as in 2007, by penny-pinching authors. The articles were uploaded and edited by people who understood that the information, and their contributions, could be accessed globally for free – and actually that, as a concept, is quite cool.

We-think-ism recognises that our minds have a true gift of creativity – which is a freedom to be individual, brave and new. The opportunities that present themselves via creativity are so much more endless than the potential to sell adverting space on yet more html rich sites on the infinite world of the web. We are not individual cogs: we are ‘we’.
Abigail