Creativity is slowly being strangled by technology. - Inspired by Richard Watson

Let me base this on how Richard Watson discerns the difference between creativity and innovation. [CREATIVITY: the ability to see things differently and have original ideas and INNOVATION: the ability to make new things actually happen]. I am creative but I am as yet not innovative and this is why I write this expression, because my self-development goal is to learn to be innovative i.e. make new things happen in my own life (not at FC) - something that I need to personally foster this year. I am also generally creative as an exception rather than a rule because the evidence as I see it, vastly suggests that people use technology to either repeat something that has been echoed before or use it for mundane (but practical) purposes that probably does not raise the users consciousness. If therefore the five people that have so far vote that disagreed with Richard Watson's statement were creative, IMHO they would cast a vote and say why they casted their vote. Then and then only would we have four pieces of evidence that creativity isn't slowly being strangled by technology. I have presented evidence of my creativity but if I represent a minority expression of such evidence, then surely Richard Watson has probably alluded to a truth rather than a generality. Creativity IMHO does not mean opinion but is the best mirror of our own soul. Maybe it is more appropriate to say that creativity is slowly being strangled by our personal choices of how we adapt or adopt technology - for one thing I surely know, technology does not come with hands - we individually do......M.

On the contrary, technology is opening ways of executing ideas that were previously impossible. -- I've got now, I don't care who's got next.

I do think creativity is affected by technology, however, I think creativity is now BOTH slowed and accelerated by technology. I agree with Mark, it is "our personal choices" and our own hands and minds that make the real difference.

I agree with Susan that technology can both encourage and impair creativity, but I think Richard Watson isn't necessarily off base. There will always be creative people, but people who aren't naturally inclined toward creativity are more likely not to even try if there's a ready-made tool for "creativity" in front of them. One example: those "creative" PowerPoint presentations. Often there's the false impression that anything that uses the latest technology is automatically creative.

I do not think that it is a question of technology per se but scope and nor am I do i want to focus on what or who people vote for, for my primary interest is crossing the bridge between creativity and to innovation, which is a personal quest and as such being thoughtful is far more productive than being right. So IMHO typically who are the kind of people who are going to respond to this creativity question but generally "creative" people like Sherri Smith, Susan Anderson and April Joyner. Yet when we are talking about scope then we now have this creative thing called interactive technology to consider and so I beg to question whether we are more creative today in comparison to those Victorian age families whose past-time flowed through natural creativity (physical games and activities that stimulated the mind) compared to today where we have an oracle of instant available information available. If we think of this in terms of scope, surely technology should be yielding a different result than "Spring Break" or a visible rise of idiocracy, or at least the top grossing movies would not be movies motivated or based on comic books - which though a creative art form, is hardly creative resonance. This "scope" therefore is at the level of what society does, not just what a small but bright group of creative people do that can write these comments or even have the ability to produce magnificent cartoon characters or even anime and manga; creative people are generally far more comfortable with disruption, yet most books on innovation and creativity are a trumpet of discussions of disruption as a new phenomena. If technology lessens our soul then I see it lessening our creativity, but if it increasing our appreciation of creativity, then Spring Break (which is my metaphor for superficial media) would become an increasingly a more redundant industry giving way to the broadening of creative world beyond the scope that even Richard Florida envisages......M.

i'd say that technology is slowly being recognized as creativity. and once people embrace this, they will see technlogy as an enabler of greater creativity.

In far to many cases the software that we use to organize our presentation structures out thinking. Microsoft Project was originated for Microsoft employees to manage their software development projects and has become the PM software of choice for many companies. As more an more people use this application, their approach to organizing a project is constrained by the strengths and weakness of the software. The built in metrics are so easy to use many loose sight of other measures that might be more useful for some types of projects. I use both MS Power Point and Apple Keynote and each has a slightly different process that can shift your presentation style because it’s just easier to go with the designers expectations than to wrestle with the software. I’m not so sure it stifles creativity but it may subtly channel it.

Don't . . . use . . . . MS Project. Use . . . Mindjet MindManager. ;)

Every need drea;-)

Every need drea;-)

Justin, technology today is an extension of a mechanical universe that has been with us since we put people into industrial mechanisms and told them how to be ENGINES of the economy, how to STEER a course or how we can be more DRIVEN in our individual lives. Your viewpoint is accurate just as much Drucker pointed out that the word Technology comes from Technos, which means art. Yet we have defined technology increasingly as machine-like extension and if creativity then is man becoming machine much like Ray Kurzweil alludes to, then is creativity really about putting the human brain on cyber-steroids or is it more than that - human ingenuity? I read somewhere that the architect Frank Gehry hardly uses computers in his design work, that he feels that it does not add to his creativity, or William Gibson who writes about technological science fiction living in a home which is surprisingly low tech. Then there is Toyota who do see technology playing a role but if the job can be done without technology at the simplest level then they will apply the simpler solution, because for them it is about a visual workplace rather than an automated workplace. Then there is Newton Minnow discussing a prior technology called Television and in his "Vast Wasteland" speech he suggests that the industry has a responsibility for fostering a creative relationship between people and what they are presented with as media, that creativity can be easily be subsumed by the lowest common denominator. So how does the birth of an increasingly narcissistic or a groupthink society going to elevate the totality of creative potential? I think technology is wonderful in the hands of people who understand it just as beer is in the hands of an individual who understands a fine brew, but before we tell the world that technology is a form of creativity (which I do not dispute) we need to get the message over that creativity needs to be recognized as a technology or again just as Drucker pointed out - an art that means way more in the entire collective history of humanity than just a USB, a wireless signal or a alwayson machine......M.

technology is garbage in and garbage out creativity is only limited by ones imagination, not the keyboard on my computer