Every time I hear the “novelty and creativity is rare” line I get so angry I have to stand up and pace to calm down.
Language, art, and media are massively combinatorial. We’ve barely been able to scratch the surface of what’s possible because we’re locked in economic systems built on uniformity and in industries that always choose the broken and bland to boost short term profits.
The absence of novelty is down to economics and your mindsets. The media themselves are as unexplored as the galaxy.
Short version: novelty and creativity is not rare; it’s unfunded.
The point of automation in media creation should be to make novelty affordable to create, not to crowd it out of existence and make practicing creativity even less economically viable.
When I first posted the above on social media, Jan D sent me a link to a wonderful paper on creativity with a note that I might enjoy it.
(Thanks Jan, I did!)
It’s Howard Becker’s Creativity Is Not a Scarce Commodity and it outlines quite well exactly what I was trying to drive at above.
Ordinary observation shows us that what is scarce is not the fact of creativity—of some kind of activity unlike what others have done before—but rather the activity of labeling something “creative.” If we look around us in the most ordinary situations of daily life we see people being creative—doing original things no one ever did quite that way before—all the time. Once we separate the originality of an idea or an action, as seen from an unbiased viewpoint, from the judgment others make of its originality and creativity, we can look for expressions of creativity everywhere. And we’ll find them.
Creativity and novelty is the norm.
Most social and cultural works are fractally combinatorial.
Just look at storytelling
- High concepts can be combined in endless ways.
- Basic plots and structures come in varieties and can be combined however you like.
- Language is endlessly flexible in how sentences and paragraphs are composed.
- Even the words themselves come in multitudes that can be combined in near infinite varieties.
Creativity is not in short supply. Novelty should not be rare. It’s made rare.
Creativity is scarce because of censorship. Not in the usual sense of that word—the cops closing down a strip show, or some government official collecting and burning politically offensive books—but rather in the sense of “discouragement,” of telling those who have creative ideas that the ideas aren’t really interesting, that they aren’t sensible, that they’re a little (or more than a little) crazy, and suggesting that it would better just to forget about them. “Nice try, but no cigar,” captures this response to unusual ideas.
It isn’t just management. We also make it rare. Every person who has some experience in media creation – whether its photography, writing, or video – has ideas that they’d like to do, but avoid because nobody has the resources to take a risk on something unprecedented.
Creativity is also, and perhaps even more pervasively, scarce because of self-censorship. In many situations, people with creative or original ideas say to themselves, “This is not worth pursuing any further, no one else will be interested, I’m just wasting my time.”
“No one else will be interested.” That may or may not be true. A lack of interest may not mean that no one thinks the idea has intrinsic merit, but rather that no one thinks the merit sufficient to justify the trouble or the investment necessary to push the idea, to work on it and get it beyond the idea stage—to move it from a blip in someone’s brain to a finished product.“
I’m interested, but I’m afraid it might not work out, so why waste time?” Here too, the imagery of investment takes over and, calculating the possible profit and the possible loss, the innovator tells himself “The hell with it.”
The issue isn’t that audiences automatically avoid novelty. Sometimes they like it; sometimes they don’t. The issue is that novelty, by definition, doesn’t have a track record, which means that you can’t predict how it’ll go, but given the nature of the economy we live in, odds are that it will not make enough money to pay for itself.
Novelty isn’t rare. The money you need to make art and media well is.
It’s also threatening.
But few people do it. The price is too high. I will put this very simply. Organizations reject new ideas because their novelty runs afoul of the way things are done. Things are done the way they are done for good reason: Just as a housewife’s dinner menus take into account her family’s idiosyncratic demands and her financial resources, an organization’s solutions to its problems must take into account the accumulated compromises and prior solutions to still other problems that have solidified into “how we do things here.” Any change will likely upset some of those, and that’s usually enough reason to not do it.
Making genuine novelty is all too often career suicide. We could have so much more, so much more variety and diversity, if we weren’t so utterly dominated by an economic system that values homogeneity and marketability over all.
Which is why I get angry when people in tech – almost always in tech – talk as if novelty and creativity is rare. It isn’t. It’s stifled and unfunded.
This keeps coming up in my discusions with people I know in tech, whether it’s the libertarian boyfriend of a cousin who was arguing at a family gathering that artists deserve to be unfaid – oblivious to the fact that he was surrounded by artists – or former coworkers who seem to think that bland uniformity is the norm for writing.
It’s frustrating because they always trot out this idea to support their notion that getting “AI” to replace much of media production and writing is a good thing.
Because novelty is rare.
Even if that were true, the last thing you’d want is to destroy industries and make it even rarer.