creating flickering shadows in a cave

August 5th, 2011 • 2 comments tech
Tags: a moveable feast, art, blather, camtasia, creation, creativity, hemingway, jing, koha, libr559m, module 4, opac, prosentient, quantity, screencast, self-reflection, social media, tags, youtube

I find I have a block when it comes to thinking about the social-ness of creativity. I tend way more towards the “huddle in the dark and make things up and don’t show anyone until it’s ready” model of art making. Blogging and tweeting and the like doesn’t feel like it’s creation at all: it’s all just blather you do to keep from really working. (I blame reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast at a formative age.)

I realize I’m using terms like art to talk about 90-second library videos here, and that that’s kind of weird. I’m not going to apologize for it though.

So creating something like this little screencast about tagging in Koha using Jing feels more like my idea of creativity. I sat here on my bed in my room, downloaded the software, wrote a short script, pressed record and then uploaded it to the site. It felt like no one was involved and it was easy to pop up onto the web. It’s not encouraging you to tweet about it while you’re doing it, just the finished product. I like how it creates an unintelligible but relatively short URL to promote Tweeting and the like, but that’s as social as this process got.

Part of that is because Jing wants you to Go Pro so you can create mp4 files and presumably then you’d be able to upload your video to YouTube or something where people actually are, watching video. And it wasn’t the pure solitary artist experience either. For that I’d need the ability to actually edit the video, to sit here laboriously sweating over each frame (which I’ve used Camtasia for in the past and it lends itself well to that, but I wanted to try something new and simple for this little activity). This is social because it’s not prompting a lot of agonized self-reflection, just the “do something and get it out there” mentality.

I’m not sure that creates greatness but quantity has its own quality, I suppose.

social media is only a means of supporting creativity

August 1st, 2011 • 7 comments library, tech
Tags: arts council, clay shirky, connection, creation, funding, gilligan's island, kickstarter, libr559m, lolcats, module 4, molly crabapple, neil gaiman, network, school, social media, support, talent, tv, twitter

Following up on my last post, I’m not so sure that “web 2.0 itself implies creativity.” I mean, I get the Clay Shirky idea that making something is better than watching Gilligan’s island so making LOLcats is fine, but I think remix culture allows for a lot of laziness.

Some of the most interesting Web 2.0 projects I’ve seen are about rewarding creators who can work outside the traditional model. Molly Crabapple’s Week in Hell (she’s locking herself in a room to create for a week) raised thousands of dollars on Kickstarter (over five times her original goal so now they’re going to make more stuff with the extra money). She’s helped raise the question of whether Kickstarter is more important/useful than Arts Council grants for artists.

So yes, social media is helping fuel that kind of creativity, but it’s important to note that people are giving her this money because of her talent. The connections are about funding and supporting creativity, not inspiring it.

I love Neil Gaiman as much as the next person, and his presence on Twitter is huge. But, I don’t love him because of that social media scene. I love the work he does. Making meaning from the banal is a nice idea about social media’s relationship to creativity, but the fact is that most of the banal is still pretty banal, even when it’s aggregated.

I guess I’m saying that “fostering connections, building networks, creating new knowledge” isn’t creative in and of itself. It has to be supportive of some actual talent.

the possibilities of trunk.ly

July 14th, 2011 • 5 comments tech
Tags: +1, affordances, approval, bookmarks, creation, feeds, filter, libr559m, like, mobile, module 1, organization, qr codes, search, share, social media, trunk.ly, twitter

trunk.ly is a link-organizing/social bookmarking tool that connects up to your social networks and attempts to parse out all the links. The idea is that bookmarking takes up mental effort so instead of you having to categorize/tag links and then go back and find them to blog about them or whatever, trunk.ly just grabs all the links you put through the rest of your socially-mediated life and makes them nice and searchable.

So as far as affordances go, what does trunk.ly suggest or invite users to do with it?

• Searching. The search bar is up on the top of the screen, white in a bar of black (unlike Twitter’s gray in a bar of black).
• Filtering. It gives you ways to filter content by the source of the link as well as by content type. You can apply tags yourself, or allow it to grab the hashtags off Twitter (it doesn’t pull the tags from straight RSS, which is annoying)
• Comment-less approval. There is the Facebook Like button, the Google +1 button and a Tweet button. Of those three only Twitter allows actual commentary. This makes it easy to express approval without having to think about adding any value through actual language.
• Sharing is the biggest affordance here. It gives you the option of following people to see what they’re linking to and suggests people (with big ol’ avatar pictures on the right hand side of the screen. Also, under each link in a person’s collection there are buttons for Sharing links via Facebook and Twitter, as well as generating a QR code for the link.

The QR code is kind of the killer feature for me. With a single click you’ve got a simple way to transfer a bookmark from your computer screen to the smartphone of someone right next to you. That person doesn’t have to type in a trunk.ly address on their tiny touchscreen device if they’re in proximity to your computer screen. This encourages an over-the-shoulder, actually in the same place kind of sharing, not just through the digital realm.

The things it doesn’t suggest:

• Creating your own content. While there is space in each bookmark for notes this is more relevant for annotation than writing blocks of text. There is no word count or even basic html formatting for creation. The implication is that you will use trunk.ly solely to pass things along.

I feel like this is going to be an issue with many of the newer forms of social media. While blogging and wikis are all about content, it seems things are getting terser and terser, leaving less room for people to think about and contribute.

I don’t know how I feel about trunk.ly, but the nice thing about it is how it gets out of your way and just sucks things in from the other feeds. It affords you the luxury of not having your cognitive load added to while it does its thing. That’s worth something I guess. Enough that I’m not shutting down my account.