Draft Text

Culture is the story we tell about ourselves, using narrative to transform information into knowledge and knowing into telling. No matter what medium we choose, creativity inevitably engages the maker and the audience in a dialog, one that has been changed through the evolved digital tools of the twenty-first century. Today, television broadcasts entertainment to the mass audience, but provides little opportunity for interaction, save perhaps changing channels. When the web first came to prominence in the early 1990s, people greeted it as an amplification of the broadcasting power of television. For a decade content providers from individuals to corporations such as Time Warner scrambled to produce content for broadcast over the internet. This paradigm, which came to be called Web 1.0, saw the web as a publishing medium. By 2004 a new paradigm, Web 2.0, emerged, one which recognized that the most important characteristic of the web was participation. Rather than simply providing more one-way content, the web is particularly good at fostering creative dialog.

Culture need not emanate only from the museum, the lyceum, or the dictates of unseen authority. Rather, culture is a social intercourse that calls for new forms of exchange, dialog, and commerce. The fundamental process of digital creativity enables the audience to engage the artist and the work in an exchange of ideas that enriches both parties. By definition, dialog refers to a conversation and we generally think of conversations as verbal. In the realm of the circuit, dialog reaches beyond verbal transactions to include all performances of the creative act.

Each new creative work is a way to understand and to create our sense of self and relation to others, as well as to contribute to the canon of understanding. Once we recognize ourselves, we become concerned with survival and then with improving our condition through learning. Having accomplished something of value, we seek to promote it, to share it with others and make an indelible mark. Our drive to propagate is the way to assure the continuation of ourselves. All the while, these acts are made more pleasant by the amusements we create. The interactivity of exchange and dialog delivers us from banal solitude.

Historically, it may be that technology has created the rift between society and the creative energies that lie at its foundation. Techniques of mass production that heralded the process of specialization, factory production, and the assembly line, while greatly increasing the output of a factory, obliterated groups of artisans who took pride in their craft. These craftsmen were transformed into a working class that drudgingly repeated a single task over and over again, becoming alienated from the final objects they produced. Workers no longer gave value to their imagination, only the volume of their output. The appreciation of imagination became a thing of leisure, a thing for the elite. The common man lost control of his own story, those links in the production process that once allowed him to connect the past with the future by creating his own narrative.

Today, the possibility of reversing this alienation lies in the creative application of digital technology. The integration of culture and creativity will be reborn in the realm of the circuit. We may all be able to weave our personal narratives into the culture at large.