Confusing Consumption with Creativity

Okay, while digging around in neglected folders I also found this old rant. So while I'm in the mode of posting past writing, here's some more:

Our agrarian forefathers lived in a culture of self-reliance. They grew and raised their own food, made their own clothes, and built their own houses. Without CD’s or radio to listen to, they made their own music or told each other stories for entertainment. Today our society is extremely interdependent. Our lifestyles have shifted from a focus on producing to a focus on consuming. We contribute something and/or create a measure of wealth at our jobs, and then for many people, every other aspect of life involves the consumption of goods and services. It has lead to a bizarre economic reality where the classic virtues of producing and saving have been replaced by our government’s desire for us to consume more because it’s good for the economy. Never mind that we are spending ourselves into oblivion. I’m simple enough to still believe that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. How can what is opposite of what’s good for me be what’s good for the country? But I’m obviously not an economics expert. I’m sure you are laughing at me already if you are one. And that’s not what I wanted to write about here anyway.

Western culture has made a profound progression in the direction of increased choice that has accelerated exponentially in my lifetime. When I was a kid the McDonalds in our town had about three choices of soda pop available. Today there are more than twice that many varieties of just Coca Cola. I generally see a wide variety of choices as a good thing. I no longer have to settle for what’s available, but can find something that’s just the way I like it. But I am finding that more and more the choices we have are running us amok. We all want a good deal on whatever it is we need or want to purchase, and we loathe the dreaded buyer’s remorse of seeing a model or color we really like better a week after it’s too late to change our minds. The decision making process involved in buying just about anything can easily consume hours, days, or weeks of thought. For some folks this seems to be little problem. They see the first thing that will do and settle for it. But I think for most Americans, if not westerners in general, we can’t help but ponder our options.

Okay, this is all obvious so far. But where is this leading us? For one thing, consumption has become quite a job in our culture. We can expend extraordinary time and mental effort trying to decide which tool would be the best for our application, or which thing would be the most pleasant to possess. This effort of selection is something that I don’t believe has existed before. Instead of consumption decisions being a matter of insignificant moments of time during our day, they can feel like an occupation. In fact, for the more affluent among us, it can become a very involved full-time career. I submit that this phenomenon of consumption feeling like work has caused a shift in our societal patterns of thought.

It has always puzzled me how in different parts of the USA where I have lived, there have been people who have said, “we’re building a house” to refer to having a house built. There are so many choices to be made and so many things to deal with when having a house built, that it is truly a grueling process, even if you never hammer one single nail. After going through the process, people often act exhausted as if they had put every two by four in place with their own hands. But they have not “built” a house. They have consumed the services of others.

One of the first laws of thermodynamics (I can never remember exactly which one) states that matter is neither created nor destroyed. King Solomon said that “there is nothing new under the sun.” As much as we might like to create something from scratch, all that exnihilo work has already been done by the Great Creator. What’s left to us to do as a reflection of that true creativity is to combine old elements in new ways. That is the essence of what we call human creativity. An artist squeezes colors out of tubes from a factory and with a brush someone made applies them to a canvas woven by yet another person, and creates a painting. We take an octave’s worth of tones in a system of intervals devised long ago on an instrument provided for us by the skill and work of some craftsman and play them in various sequences and combinations to “create” music. All creative endeavor stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before. All generators of intellectual property are influenced by those who have generated the legacy of existing work. No one works in a vacuum. The question of what is original and what is plagiarism can become very sticky. My friend who has a doctorate sees this clearer than I do. He says the difference is whether the components being used are elemental in nature or are composites of someone else’s design. This is a good starting point, but to me it still gets sticky when you chase the rabbit far enough.

Nowhere is the confusion more glaring than in the realm of today’s computer software. There are amazing tools available to lay out elements creatively into graphics, music, web sites, DVD’s, etc. But there are also products that produce a similar result by dropping visuals, text, sounds or whatever into a template. (This blog is made that way.) Is it creative to choose a template and insert your content? Even simple software like this requires a modicum of skill to be mastered. But is the user a creator or a consumer? I think most would land on the side of consumer.

Here’s another technology example. A software package called Acid by Sonic Foundry (now owned by Sony), and several others very similar, allows music to be produced using short clips of pre-recorded music called loops. One simply selects a loop and drags it with a mouse to a timeline. The loop may be a single note but usually is a short phrase of music or a percussion pattern. The loops can be repeated and layered on top of each other to build up an entire song. If one chooses loops of differing musical keys that would sound dissonant if put together, the software automatically shifts the pitch of the subsequent loops to match the key of the first loop. Differences in tempo are also automatically adjusted to be compatible. One can end up with a recording of musical presentation that has never been heard before in that combination. And this can be done with absolutely no knowledge of musical theory or skill in playing any kind of instrument. It is all done by moving a mouse and clicking it’s button. It certainly is a handy way to get a music track for a video production. But is this creating music? If one takes a single loop and lays it down over and over again in a monotonous repetition, it is obviously not. But what if one takes dozens or hundreds of widely divergent chunks of sound and combines them many layers deep in ingenious patterns? This will never get you to Carnegie Hall, but I think true creativity can be expressed in such work.

A lively debate continues regarding the legitimacy and legal ramifications of combining bits and pieces of existing recordings into new recordings. Is this creativity or consumption? Can consumption be art? What of the artist who uses these tools to plagiarize his own previous work and manipulate it into new versions or completely new works?

Here’s another scenario, not at all uncommon today. One takes someone else’s visual, say a photograph. The photograph is cut up or distorted or effected in such a way that it is no longer recognizable even to its original creator. Does this new entity belong to the person who distorted it? Is this creativity or consumption?

We have been considering creation using computer software. But isn’t the use of any software a form of consumption? The person who writes the program which allows others to be creative with its use may be the most creative of all. The result of his or her work is leveraged into the output of every user of the software. But we don’t think of those guys that way. They are technicians. They are geeks. We don’t consider them artists. We may or may not consider the luthier an artist, but with no instrument to play, there is no music.

New technological means of combining existing elements are most certainly useful and have their place. A template built website is probably better than no website at all. The danger to our culture, however, is when we consider ourselves creative when we do minor finishing or revision to someone else’s work. Then our art becomes dulled by inbreeding at best and repulsive regurgitation at worst.

Creativity and consumption seem to be obvious polar opposites at first glance. But confusion of them is rampant and I fear will only get worse.