Creativity and the hive mind

One of the great challenges to creativity is the Internet as a portal to seemingly unlimited information. Entering that portal turns many of us into yak shavers. We finish with one yak, then another comes along, and another and at the end of the day, the floor is covered with pretty much an indistinguishable amount of yak hair which we’ve done nothing to weave into the next magical garment of the mind. Piles and piles of that hair build day after day until we no longer remember why we came to shave the yak or what in God’s name we will ever do with all the hair we’ve found.

 

We are not alone.

 

We enter the Internet as an individual but once inside we become part of a hive. Yes, the metaphors (hive and yak shaving are mixed) are jumbled but so is pretty much everything else inside the hive. Creativity is not a collective venture; that is the place of mash ups and remixing. Nothing wrong with that activity. It is the honey that hives produce and consume. And it can go viral so all of us are drinking from the same cup.

 

Being alone, disconnected with the hive mind is where creativity dwells. Stay away too long and you find yourself fit only for life inside the hive. There lies our existential danger. Yak shave long enough and you will ultimately get lost in the process and never find your way out.

 

I’ve written over 20 books. In the future, will we produce writers who have retained the ability for sustained creativity outside of the hive experience? Of course there will always be the rebel who takes a different path. But for the rest of us; the community of readers who also unplug from the hive each time they open a book, will they fade away like an evolutionary dead end experiment? It is no good being a rebel if there is no one left to notice.

 

What has inspired this walk around the hive is an interview with Bill Wasik.

 

And how did I stumble across this interview? Yak shaving. Buzzing around endlessly in the hive.

Salon has an interesting interview with Bill Wasik who has a new book titled: And Then There’s This: How Short Stories Die in Viral Culture.

“I would say that if there’s one thing that’s causing the novels of the world from getting written right now, it’s surfing the Internet. I do think that a lot of creative people want to be working on their craft, they want to be thinking big about what they should be doing and my belief is that the culture is encouraging them to think small. To me, the challenge is to try to find ways to partially unplug ourselves. To carve out spaces in our lives away from information. Away from the sort of constant buzzing of the hive mind. I think some of these constraints can just be arbitrary. Tuesdays, I’m not going to look at the Internet. I think that can often be effective. Another way of working on it is to develop more effective filters of information. Instead of just freely clicking around from site to site to site, and before you know it, you’ve spent four hours following your whimsy every which way, instead pick out a few sources of information that you feel like are not just crucial and well-done, but also fairly broad based and representative. To me, the most important step is recognizing that you can’t possibly take in all the information that’s out there. [You need to] make a wise intervention into your information consumption and try to make it manageable so that you can live a happy life and save time for the thinking of higher things.”

 

Blog from: http://www.cgmoore.com

American Film and TV Star David Carradine found dead in Bangkok hotel

 

 

www.david-carradine.com

Dying under mysterious circumstances in Thailand if you are a famous American actor is bound to attract international coverage. I first saw the first coverage on Thursday night on the BBC news around 10.00 p.m. News of Carradine’s death has been picked up in virtually every major newspaper around the world. David Carradine’s death in a Bangkok hotel on 4^th June 2009 will shine a spotlight on Thailand, the tourism industry and police investigations and methods used when a foreigner is found dead.

 

The first order of business in an unnatural death investigation is to find out what happened, when it happened, who was at the scene, and what material evidence at the scene may support the cause of death. But this is no ordinary death and that fact will no doubt have significant implications in what happens next. This is true for any police force. High profile deaths are one of the few circumstances where the general public takes interest in the professionalism of police investigators.

 

The established facts are few. Mr. Carradine was found dead in his room at the Nai Lert Park Hotel. He’d been in Bangkok since 2^nd June working on a film. His body has apparently been removed to Chulalongkorn hospital and there will be an autopsy.

 

Some local press have called Carradine’s death a suicide.

Others have been more cautious and have left open the possibility of murder or misadventure in sexual game playing. Reports have been contradictory, some saying the actor had hanged himself with a rope, others saying it was a curtain cord, and others saying it was a shoe lace with one end tied around his neck and the other around is penis suggesting a sexual ritual gone wrong.

In a high profile case such as this, senior officials wake up to the fact that the world is watching them. Such attention can make people sweat. Giving out premature statements before the facts have been established often happens but not when the international media is watching. Then it becomes embarrassing.

The last 24-hours has only increased speculation and rumors about the circumstances of Carradine’s death. In other words there is confusion over what and how it happened but no end of people who sure they know the answers nonetheless. Unless properly handled, it has the makings of public relations disaster. The buck passing will kick into high gear. The Press quotes the police who’ve had no time to launch an investigation and analysis the evidence, the US embassy passes the buck to the police, and the police can refer matters to the medical authorities.

We live in an age where everyone wants instant answers. Like a CSI program, the answers should follow within one hour. Right? Only in real life, the circumstances of unnatural deaths such as Carradine’s are often murky, the evidence conflicting or inconclusive, and the outside pressures to come to a conclusion intense.

If Colonel Pratt and Calvino were on the case, they’d be checking the hotel CTV camera footage in the lobby and entrance (and on the floor of the room – assuming such a camera system was installed) for the time period prior to Carradine’s death, interviewing the doormen, receptionists, bellboys, other guests in adjacent rooms, the last person(s) who saw him, members of the film crew. That is a lot of work.

Also Colonel Pratt would likely order a full toxicity test on the body to test for alcohol and drugs. He’d have sealed off the room and photographed (among other things) and preserved the footprint that apparently was found on the actor’s bed. He’d be looking for fibers on the rope, cord, and shoestring, whatever it was found around the actor’s neck. A room sealed off as a crime scene, allows the possibility for the forensic team to find fingerprints, hair, skin, marks on the body, fingernails, and DNA traces that might yield evidence as to whom else (if anyone) was in the room at the time of the death.

Blog from: http://www.cgmoore.com