DAY NINE

Does creativity have to be an individual activity? And does it have to be intentional? 

Two quite different events brought these questions to mind in the past few days. The first was on my walk back from the supermarket when I found myself cutting a corner across a roadside verge along a desire path [Guardian newspaper article, opens in new window]. The 'path' was in fact so short, a handful of steps, as to not offer any real saving in time or energy, but it just so happened there was a group of people in the way and it was the easier way around them.
 
I've always been an admirer of such paths, mostly anyway, seeing them as a community expression of commonsense, resistance to the dictats of traffic engineers and urban planners, and a practical example of the wisdom of crowds - developing an efficient solution through the repetitive choices of individuals. 
 
There are exceptions, sometimes these paths can ruin an otherwise pleasant view or seem closer to an expression of collective laziness or vandalism.  Ridiculously short corner cutting of the sort just mentioned are really just lazy, when it comes down to it, but mostly I think desire paths 'fill-in' what was otherwise a missing component of the landscape, as evidenced by wiser public authorities sometimes coming in later to make them legit and more usable with surfacing or signage - a sort of corporate 'styling it out'. [The Free Dictionary, opens in new window].

I'd never really thought of them as a collective creative response to the environment however, not until the other day, and no doubt because this blog has been lurking around my sub-conscious for most of the past week. 
 
As I crossed that verge, this is what prompted the questions: can the repeated actions of a disparate group of individuals, each of them following their own convenience and without reference to any other individual, be considered a creative act? I have to admit to some discomfort in answering yes, because this description comes very close to what might be described as a 'market solution', for which there are already far too many cheerleaders.

Everyday Creativity

Which is the emphasis in that subheading, the first word or the second? 

The second event which made me wonder about creativity as an individual act, is that on a whim I decided to check out a social media platform that has been in the news lately. No, not that one. 
 
I don't do social media, and haven't done for about three years, as I found the whole experience toxic and deeply uninteresting. I never understood the point of people endlessly regurgitating repeating/retweeting other people's thoughts and/or showing obeisance to random individuals of whom they have no real personal knowledge. And that's without the tribalism to which I discovered myself not to be immune. It was about as far from 'connection' (with oneself or others) as I could imagine. 

This new platform is touted to score far better on the toxicity meter, and in general is presented as taking a more considered approach altogether. So signed up, logged in, I went looking for like minded souls by searching on #creativity. And my heart almost immediately began to sink. Legions of evangelists expressing an interest, expertise, or a new improved creativity based snake oil to improve your (though more likely their) business/wealth/personal wellbeing/other.

Now I'm sure that many on the site, perhaps most, are quite genuine and have the same sort of interests in creativity as I do, but - and I realise I may be the bad guy here - I would be happier if there were far, far, far fewer proselytizers about it. Can it not be just an everyday thing, that everyday people do, in an everyday fashion?

This is not just a social media thing with me. I have never been particularly interested in other people's enthusiasms - reminds me of having to politely sit through a presentation of their wedding photos or holiday snaps. Sure, I can empathise with the facts of their experience, be pleased for what they got out of it, but please don't expect, still less force, me to share it with them after the event.
 
This is the curse of social media and the knowledge economy, things just cannot be left alone unto themselves as private pleasures and experience, but instead even personal interests and hobbies become curated for public consumption, and in that conversion, for me at least, are reduced by it. 

This is why this blog is deliberately not SEO savvy, eschews titles for the posts, will not generally feature any of my work (with the implicit demand that you should like or otherwise approve it), and will never be advertised on any public platform. If people discover the blog serendipitously, all to the good, and if they don't, all to the good.

Onwards...




Image Credit:Alan Stanton, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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