Creativity and Copyfight

If you are a nerdfighter (and you probably are, or should be) then you may have seen the Vlog Brothers' short video on "I Gotta Go". In it, the hosts discuss their use of a sign-off phrase, which they've been doing for years. The brothers realize that their use of this phrase, and much of the style of their videos that they had taken to be unique to themselves, derives instead from childhood hours listening to Ian Shoales commentaries.

This leads to a riff on the notion of creativity and they come around to the idea that creativity isn't a single artist locked in a room, but rather is a creator who is soaked in the cultural milieu of their time and place and whose influences may not even be conscious. As one of them says, "this [sign-off phrase] is deep in my brain."

Long-time Copyfight readers will know that this is the view I've had since I started blogging here. It's been important for me to state that because so much of corporate creativity is based on the myth of the sole creator. I'm not saying that people whose output goes through the professional systems (publishing, record labels, movie studios, etc) are not creative. But in fighting over who has the rights to such creative output, the Cartel has found it convenient to push the myth that creativity is exclusively the province of the most recent person to touch it. The fight against remix culture brought this back into sharp focus, with the assertion that sampling so small an amount as a three-note phrase was "stealing" someone else's "original work."

I can clearly spot my own conversion to the cultural model of creativity: a class I took from Henry Jenkins at MIT. That class changed my ideas about how creativity works, and very nearly rid me of my elitist bias in favor of high art over pop art. Then again, Jackass. I retain my biases, and how Copyfight expresses some of them.

You may have noticed that I'm not posting much here lately. There are a bunch of reasons for that. For one, work has gotten really busy and I don't have a lot of energy for doing more writing when I get home. I also am discouraged by the loss of all the comments that got wiped out in my attempt to deal with the ongoing current of spam. Very few people take the time to comment on entries and I appreciate those who do.

I am also trying to figure out what kinds of things I want to put in the blog. If I have time for fewer entries then I'm likely to shed small stories or things that interest me less, and try to focus what time I do have on things I find more worthwhile. However, that contributes to the blog's quiescence, which isn't good for the blog or regular readership.

Thanks for listening; thanks for reading.