Social Media, Structure, and the Creative Cycle

by Brian on 11-24-2009

Reflecting on last weekend’s talk on creativity I worried that probably emphasized the “open” aspect of the creative cycle at the expense of the “closed” aspect. My gist seemed to be, “Don’t worry about anything… try everything, and fantastic creations will magically appear.”

Given the circumstances, I’m happy I erred that way rather than the other. We need free & open experiments now more than ever — and London, especially, is not going to run out of closed-ended thinking any time soon.

Being comfortable with uncertainty is something we need to get better at. This is the 21st century; nobody knows anything anymore…

But I have to backtrack a little.

Ultimately we need a balance

Just as we can think of creative inspiration as a collision between two objects — or, as in the quote I used from Bruce Mau, “the third object” — the process of creativity is a conflagration of two impulses resulting in something new and independent.

These go by different names but the ways they break down are roughly similar:

open & closed
free & disciplined
divergent & convergent
dynamic & static
subjective & objective

Creativity seems to be essentially an effort to resolve an imbalance between the two conditions — the way electricity flows to resolve an imbalance negative and positive charges.

In ambiguous and wildly dynamic circumstances, creators take on a calming role; they’ll create convergent objects — stories and artifacts that bring everything together, concepts that make the world seem simpler than previously feared.

In settled and dormant circumstances, creators take on a more anarchic role; they’ll create divergent objects that challenge old conventions and reveal the world to be more chaotic and complex than previously assumed.

To use the “third object” metaphor, ideas and works of art are intermediaries or objects representing transformation. In times of chaos, creators build bridges to close gaps, drawing lines to show how things relate. In times of stagnancy, creators build wedges to separate things, drawing lines to distinguish differences.

Many creators are better in one mode than another; but as we learn more about the creative mind and how to manage the creative process, I’m promoting a more deliberate effort to use one mode to facilitate the other and vice versa.

The value of constraints & discipline

As George Santayana wrote in (one of the books that most influenced me) Three Metaphysical Poets:

The outer life is for the sake of the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and conquest is for the sake of self-possession.

Poetry demonstrates how structure aids freedom and freedom in turn keeps structures vital.

Whenever I try expressing something poetically, the challenge of fitting rough thoughts into a formal structure leads to fresh insights. It creates a frame in which the imagination can play safely with fewer distractions.

Excess opportunity stifles intellect, dissolves focus and escapes productivity; while via the strict constraints of metre and rhyme, the mind’s freed from an oppressive infinity, it inverts the universe into a new form, like a pore through which inspiration drips forward — concentrated, it penetrates like a laser, through masses and layers of ambiguity — proceeding in increments towards a design, refined through time by poetic dexterity; as if whispered by God, new meaning is expressed.

I very rarely try to write poetry — only when I have a kind of pseudo-profound thought germinating but I’m not quite sure what to do with it. By articulating half of it in a phrase two, then trying to complete the thought within certain constraints (i.e. with something that rhymes and has the same number of syllables) the possibilities are condensed from an amorphous cloud into a coherent, manageable stream of consciousness.

The structure keeps the process moving along rather than getting bogged down by endless possibilities.

Structures are human

Readers, listeners, viewers can more easily grasp the meaning (or use, or value) from creations that accord with familiar templates, patterns, formulas, and models.

Of course, to a substantial (but not un-controversial) degree, these templates and formulas are already given by nature.

Dennis Dutton’s Art Instict is a great recent summary of evidence of how deeply embedded our aesthetic dispositions are within the human genome. For example, people from many different cultures felt the same affinity for savannah-like landscapes featuring scattered trees, short grass, an open vista, and water — even if such an environment was foreign to their experience.

(Also see On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd; or more immediately, check out this clip from a recent chat between Steven Pinker and Robert Wright.)

As I discussed in an older (and more thoroughly researched) post on creativity, the process of evolution doesn’t just apply to our genetic dispositions, it applies to our ideas and creations themselves.

Human creativity is a kind of micro-evolutionary process that occurs not just biologically and physically but in our minds as well as in our organizations, industries, and fields.

The most successful creators and innovators don’t just produce more good ideas than everybody else, they produce more bad ideas too. It’s about maximizing the number of “third objects” generated — then aggressively testing, editing, and selecting (i.e. eliminating).

Call it survival of the fittest ideas.

Revolutionary structures

In terms of understanding this process, the stage we’re at now seems analogous to what knowledge of electricity was in the mid-18th century.

Back then “electricians” had developed a lot of tricks for generating sparks, storing charges in jars, and conducting shocks (e.g. through groups of people holding hands) but there was little agreement as to what electricity was — i.e. was it a kind of “fluid”? was lightning electricity too? — nor what to use it for and how to proceed with further investigations.

Then Benjamin Franklin and others after him initiated a paradigm that focused the field of research and turned the study of electricity into a genuine science.

As described by Thomas Kuhn in this Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

… the end of interschool debate ended the constant reiteration of fundamentals and partly because the confidence that they were on the right track encouraged scientists to undertake more precise, esoteric, and consuming sorts of work… Both fact collection and theory articulation became highly directed activities. The effectiveness and efficiency of electrical research increased accordingly, providing evidence for a societal version of Francis Bacon’s acute methodological dictum: “Truth emerges more readily from error than confusion.”

It’s like poetry: even the most arbitrary and artificial constraints serve to narrow and organize the field of options so we can at least start testing and eliminating them and keep moving forward.

Social media’s unsocial paradigm

Kuhn’s phrase “constant reiteration of fundamentals” reminds me of the discussions we see now about the web, creativity, design thinking, open innovation, social media, crowdsourcing, prosumers, the economies of attention and relationship, etc.

Everyone has a slightly different interpretation, with a slightly different vocabulary (that is constantly evolving). Batches of books keep coming out that say essentially the same things in different ways, suited to slightly different needs (which is natural). There’s a lot of corroboration and consistency but it’s mostly tacit and subjective, difficult to get an objective grasp on.

So when we find ourselves in disagreement — like Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble recently have (see here and here) — we have to be nice to each other, agree to disagree, and wait for new features to come along and reframe the disagreement or make it irrelevant. We lack the basis for objectively placing each other’s interpretations in relation to each other.

Most disagreements don’t even matter very much because people inhabit different spaces within the domain. That helps everyone get along, but a lack of friction also indicates a lack of scientific traction. There’s no rigorous, canonical framework for figuring out who’s right and decisively eliminating the bad ideas (other than watching them try and fail).

There’s little in the way of unifying structure — no definitive map, no architecture that shows exactly how everything connects.

We’re well into the digital age but still camped in tents.

That might be acceptable (and probably necessary for a time) but I don’t think it’s optimal or sustainable. It has to change eventually.

A new lightning rod

There’s a lot of electricity in the air.

It’s going to ground itself somehow — whether we wait for sparks to fly or whether we construct some kind of theory, structure, or apparatus for conducting it in the most generative (or least destructive) way.

To be continued…