I want to write about a rather sad topic today.
This blog entry is about the loss of creativity in the internet.
Despite my knowledge of myself being no better sometimes, I was sometimes deeply wondering why were are less and less good ideas out there. We have now access to the biggest communication network humanity has built so far and can exchange tremendous amounts of data in the shortest periods of time. But this is already where the problem begins, as it would be rather logic that we now fetch solutions to our local problems from the endless databases instead of our own brains. Anyway that is not the point I want to write here. Idea exchange is certainly a good thing and even if you learn how to do things from other people, you still learn them. The problem or part of it is that more and more people seem to accept or even like the quirks and edges of objects off their everyday life. If the handle of their toaster breaks of, they don’t fix it and post a tutorial about it. They simply write about it in their favorite social network and live with it. If something breaks apart and is beyond repair, people seem to rather throw it away than take a look inside and see if they can do new stuff with it. People seem to be less productive when it comes to things like art, be it drawn art, music or just a nice story. Fiction appears to be overwhelmed by cold facts.
I have a theory why these symptoms may occur.
Due to the presence of “virtual” people and their “virtual” lifes around us all the time, we are forced to compare their living with ours. Thats what humans do all the time and I won’t blame them for it, but in our time it has become extremely easy to find a virtual life more interesting than yours. In all the years of only voice or text communication, it had been rather easy to have a life on your own, but in our world, things have changed.
It has become much easier to get your life on the global stage but parallel to this development, the average life has gotten more boring than ever. In the gray times of our ancestors, they never had this much free time as we do, I just think they used it more properly. Today, many people are just spectators of the lifes of others. The most popular source of information in our time are the lifes of others. The phrase “get a life” has gotten a new meaning. It no longer means “live your life so you can talk about it” but rather “become regular spectator of the life of someone else so you can talk about it”. It is sad that today many people just watch people live but don’t live their own life.
Why should we care about some over-hyped star from the TV if we could create, make, repair or do something in the meantime? In my whole life, I never wanted to be a spectator, I always wanted to create. The main input stream I get from the internet today is not related to any famous person at all. It is the blogs of normal persons, filled with their thoughts. I don’t use them as a life substitute but rather as a source of inspiration. The whole aspect of creation - be it art of technology - has become so pervertedly over-hyped (presumably because our civilization is based on it) that only few people actually feel free to attempt to do so. The average life has become so boring in contrast to the lifes you could watch around it, that the small quirks and faults in their lifes are a contrast to the lifes of others. It makes me sick to think about errors and imperfection might be the only things that define their lifes, that make them individual. If you think about it, you no longer have to wonder why so many zombie-apocalypse novels have come out it the last couple of years: big parts of humanity are on their best way to become brain-dead entities whose only task it is to eat and make more of their kind.
Please, don’t let this happen to you. Life is such a wonderful thing if you dive into it. Art is what makes our lifes even better. Please don’t stop at this step of human development, the future is already here!
Get creating!
