I have just received your invitation to take part in the topic and I will
try to share it. I believe that New Media is appropriate to support artistic
expression related to social matters, because it's configuration enhances
non-linear creativity, which is the kind of creative mode utilized in social
connections.
According to Levy-Strauss, creating artifacts requires compiling and putting
together different elements (such as symbols, shapes, images, stiles,
memories, precedents, materials). As far as I have observed, this process
can be carried out in two ways. The first one consist of beginning
assembling possibilities in a certain scheme or structure, as piling up
sculpted stones and ashlars to create the front wall of a Romanic church.
The second strategy is to start considering possibilities, arranging them,
collecting, putting them together to slowly develop a certain structure,
like Julio Gonzalez when took found elements to his studio and fit them
together to create an artwork.
I think the first strategy responds to a kind to a linear creativity, it
starts off with an idea and necessarily reach to a final form. The second
one do not appear to have any beginning nor finishing, and it seems that
could be changing all the time, this is, it seems to be fluid although we
are looking at its apparently constant manifestation. I would like to call
it nonlinear creativity.
Manovich analyzes how appearance (in a browser or other specific interface)
is different to the content due to the modular configuration of new media,
and as a result, the content is independent from the composition. If we
agree to that, we should admit New Media is rather suitable for nonlinear
creativity, where different inputs are dumped to evolve different forms.
It appears to me that social connectivity platforms become the user
conscious of that sort of work in progress. Answering to the raised question
"Is (new) media a tool which reinforces people's creativity and how it is
expressed in terms of social behavior?" I think New Media allows emergent
behavior and performing, as the user can rearrange the different elements
and use them in other way that they were supposed to. In new media rules
occur as a result of the possible.
Whatever for you use Facebook (get news of people that you haven't seen for
decades, game, get known, select suitable people to rape, steal or kill…)
you have the possibility of rearranging the elements to develop an emergent
usage. (Or you can always stick to the rules). This affects to our "real
social life" as well, because now a day's meat willing people in their
Saturday night crusade do not ask for mobile number nor messenger, but for
the facebook, or similar.
Can we transport the idea of nonlinear creativity to the way youngsters and
people in general construct their identity? As the profile shows all the
modular elements of my identity, I should think this mediated identity is
built up nonlinearly, as an assemblage of elements that I have put in there.
So the vision that I have of myself and the vision others have appears to
match there.
Related to the question: What is the impact of the media content on identity
in your socio-politic sphere? Media content anticipates the form of the
identity I can express through media. Then, I cannot think of media as a
trace of real life, neither symbolization, despite using traces (pictures,
drawings, words, anecdotes) and using symbols. By rearranging media content
identity seems also to be changed.
In Spain there is a social network called TWENTY www.twenty.es where I have
interacted with my pupils for a month and I could derive first of all that
they reproduced their class relation structures in there and by the way that
there was strengthened the idea of local community. Second, that they
treated to express their identity the most accurate they could, for the
receptors were known people. Third, that they did emergent use of the
platform supplanting identities, spreading rumors… Fourth, what they put
there was not a representation of the life but a commentary to it, or a
continuation of it. For example, they took pictures specifically to put them
there.
Best wishes,
Samuel
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