Date posted: May 1, 2008

Sleeveface, Song Charts and Distributed Creativity

The sleeveface and song chart phenomena are examples of what, for lack of a better term, I will provisionally call distributed creativity.

Someone has an idea and posts it online. Another person picks up on it and posts another instance of the same idea. It may be a poor imitation, but it may also improve upon the original. People with different backgrounds, more time, better resources will copy the idea and post their versions. The idea mutates, differentiates and crystallizes. The people behind these ideas remain mostly anonymous, although some may establish a name for themselves by creating various instances of the same idea.

The mathematics of networks explains how ideas spread and catch on. There’s no real need to invent new notions such as a meme, which have little or no additional explanatory power. It suffices to change the point of view from people having an idea to ideas incubating in and jumping between people.

In the past ideas travelled slowly and a single person could build a reputation on an idea. Today ideas travel fast. As the number of people in the network grows, they also differentiate and proliferate at an accelarating speed.

This is good news for consumers of ideas, design and art. Artists and designers as producers of ideas will have to adapt to the new environment. Perhaps the dialetic of consumption and production is no longer adequate to capture the dynamics of todays markets for ideas. If you’re consuming art you’re producing affects and other responses. If you’re producing ideas you are channeling the ideas you have consumed.

There is an ever growing number of artists, designers, writers etc. The number of “great” artists and designers also continues to grow day-by-day. If you were to list the names of people who are said to be “one of the greatest (..) working today” in publicity material, it would be longer than a list of those who have died.

Various trends in the arts testify to this changing environment. For several decades some musicians earned a fortune from record sales. With dwindling music sales, increasingly musicians rely on ticket sales from live performances and merchandising. In the visual arts artists seek to emphasize anything that makes a work authentic: the material, an installation or performance.

This new environment also calls for editors and criticism. It follows from the structure of networks that “the rich get richer” and this is precisely what you can see at sites such as YouTube. Once a video gets a lot of views it will attract even more views. Editors and critics can uncover neglected ideas, videos etc. that deserve to be seen.

This trend mirrors developments in other fields. In the world of finance funds of funds invest in several hedge funds. Since the number of funds of funds also grows, there are now even funds of funds of funds.

In science Trends, Reviews, Current and Current Opinion journals attempt to review the rapidly growing scientific output published in other journals.

All of this I find very exciting. The world is becoming a more interesting place with ever more to explore. It's just that the number of hours in a day and the number of days in a week is still the same.