White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 10Creativity and communications in the new mediaAlberto AbruzzeseToday the usual answer to the question of how creativity is changing after the advent ofthe new media is to emphasise the cross-media nature (multimedia and interactive) oftheir technological platforms but without going beyond the mindset of unidirectionalcommunications paradigms.This typical mindset – forward-looking but intent on continuity – is also the source formany statements on the new communicational potential said to arise from bottom-uprather than top-down or centre-down creativity, as are the calls for greaterpersonalisation, on one hand, and more collective solidarity, on the other. But all thesequalities are perfectly compatible – in the framework of a democratic Western tradition– with the transformations and also dialectic opposition contemplated by thedevelopment models of modern society, its powers, players and knowledge.But if instead of referring to improvements to traditional communication strategies andthe development of creativity practices incorporated in these strategies, we move on tocircumscribe mainly or only forms based on web communications (boosted by Web 2.0)within the area of the new media, then the development model of the historical media ofmass society seems to have reached an extreme limit or the threshold of disintegration.Creativity is thus experiencing a twofold possible regeneration, or rather two waysforward have opened up but to uncertain outcomes. The first lies on the consumer sideand is increasingly detached from forms of traditional media creativity, i.e. creativityinscribed in the modes of production, distribution and consumption. The second wayforward sees the collapse of paradigms based on the opposition between top andbottom, centre and periphery. Dichotomies associated with them are also graduallydisappearing: mind and body, knowledge and passions, individual and mass.The modern world has convinced us that creativity is founded on talent or genius,excellence or development. But the new horizons opened up by the new media havebrought forms of creativity which concern situations and processes, zones of instabilityrather than stability, overlapping fields instead of clear-cut borders, trends to decivilisationrather than civilisation, opaque rather than transparent zones, a sense of thetragic and comic instead of comedies and novels, hybridisation of the flesh rather thancontrol of the body, the corrosion of ethics, aesthetics and policies of belonging andidentity, the cult of inhabiting but not in geopolitical spaces, the cult of doing and havingbut not of being administrated.The new media may become creativity that is neither transmitted, taught orcommunicated but simply experienced. This means in some ways a creativity that isevent-based, fluctuating, situational, oral, experiential, psychosomatic.WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 241