Are we confusing “provocative” with “creative”?

Sure, Jamie Varon’s campaign to get hired by Twitter was unique. It grabbed the attention of thousands of readers and eventually propelled her into Twitter HQ for an interview.  It stands as a symbol of the power of social networking, blogging, and communicating with new media.

But what kind of power is this? Is this the power to be creative, to be exploratory?  Or is this the power to be provocative–the ability to force eyeballs upon a subject, an issue, a call for action–but not to forge new ground in any direction?

Of course, I am attempting to be provocative here–and I have no aspirations to actually be creative.  I’m simply calling our attention to the ways that the Twitter-era privileges and produces more controversy than artistry.  It is a supreme irony that I rely on a blog post to propose this topic.

Take the fall-out over Penelope Trunk’s tweet about her miscarriage.  And for a minute, suspend your judgement about whether or not you think she was right or wrong.  What is really going on in the conversation?

Penelope started by speaking her mind, received a tremendous amout of feedback from her friends, enemies, and frenemies, and eventually appeared on major media networks to defend her position.  Did she use Twitter to be inventive?  Certainly not.

Now, this is not to say that there’s no value in a tweet like Penelope’s.  We have to recognize that she used Twitter to bring awareness to something–a complicated subject like abortion from which people typically shy away at all costs.  If the tweet was not inventive, it remained thought-provoking.

Penelope’s tweet and the storm around it are just one of many examples of the ways people confuse being creative with being provocative. Here’s another way to think of this, courtesy of Chuck Klosterman in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (a fairly eye-catching title, eh?).

Klosterman says that people who say they are creative (me included) are not truly creative–instead, they only know what other people think “creativity” should be. They produce ideas or objects or whatever to fit a certain mold of thought–and this, he says, is conformity, not creativity. Because creativity is all about breaking new ground, not treading over well-worn paths.

This is food for thought for all of us creative types: are we trying to be what society has accepted as “creative”–manipulating the tools of social media in order to appear creative and thought-provoking?

Or are we trying to be creative to the core of its meaning?

What do you think?  Let’s have a conversation about this in the comments below.

History, like Frampton, comes alive!

The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Center, in Yellowknife, Canada, has assembled a fantastic online tool for learning about the history of the Northwest Territories.

The tool incorporates the basic timeline of the Territories’ past with links to primary documents–images, papers, and artifacts–which can be found in the PWC’s collection.

If only for a neat distraction from what you are doing right now, please check out some living history here.

Capturing Creativity (an apology to my blog)

I’m sorry blog.  I can make it up to you, I swear.

I didn’t mean it.  I had great intentions to create a blog worth reading.  But I did not follow through on them.  I fell victim to the worst blogger trap.  I let you go stale.  Like that leftover half loaf of bread we end up feeding to birds.  I’m so sorry.  But I know where I went wrong.

Blog, I must admit I was not using you to capture creativity.  Instead, I had turned to other sources, like some unsatisfied middle-aged man.

And that’s just not right.  Because, after all, the heart of a blog is its writer’s creativity.  I was sapping that by writing elsewhere.  At least I can admit it–and that is an important lesson.

Capturing the thoughts that bounce around the ole noggin’ is critical to developing new, unique ideas. This isn’t rocket science.  You’ve seen it before:  while in a meeting, someone makes a sudden, quick movement–grasping for their pen and then their shirt pocket (where their post-it notes are stored), to jot down a moment of inspiration.  Or, someone whips out a tape recorder and dictates a few lines of clarity to be remembered later.  It’s not about waiting for inspiration to come; its about not letting the inspiration slip away.

This picture of creativity runs against the grain of its conventional image:  You should be able to sit down with anyone, anywhere and pump out top-notch insights.  But that’s not the way my mind works.  My mind works in the background.  After I’ve thought about something intensely (my dissertation, for example)–I find it is useful to power down the engines on that thought for a while, and consider something else (what I’ll eat for dinner, for example).  Meanwhile, somewhere within the walls of my brain, the puzzles and intricacies of that first problem are being worked out, even though I’m not focusing on them.  If nothing else, conceiving my thought process in this fashion gives me a confidence boost.

I know this is how my brain works–because I’ve felt it.  I’ve had sleepless nights when my brain is racing.  Thoughts fly in and out–in a seemingly random manner.  If I listen to the noise, I can make sense of it.  These are the results of all the processing my mind has done while I’ve been doing my day-to-day.

Sometimes I have to wake up, pull myself out of bed and get the ideas out–like taking out the trash–but this time, the things coming out of the container are worth saving.  I’m just making space for the brain to work on other things. I’m paying attention to capturing the creativity, anywhere or anytime.

This past semester, I employed another strategy of squeezing the most from my creative juices.  I started writing myself emails–and collected them in a folder called “PhD Thoughts.”  I use Gmail (If you don’t, please stop reading and start your own account, or we won’t be friends) and their organization/searhability makes me re-accessing these thoughts later a cinch.  Yet, in my excitement about this newly harnessed and stored creativity, I forgot about you, blog.

Can you forgive me?  I’ve made a renewed promise to use you more (that sounds harsh, I know).