By: Olivia McCown –
“Has the rise of technology helped or hindered our society and human connection? Write a five paragraph essay in response of this prompt.”
In some way, shape, or form, we have all written a similar essay. Our redundant ideas are confined to five boxes, griping about how real human connection is dead, despite not believing a word of what we are writing. Within seconds, we could look up this prompt and find thousands of other essays almost exactly like our own, just put together differently.
“When I was writing my stories,” said Samuel Segrist, an English teacher at Southeast. “I always felt like they weren’t good enough. That they were lesser copies of better stories or works of art that had inspired me.”
Just like stories, every snowflake is unique. Looking around us, it seems impossible to find two exactly alike. But maybe increasing the area of our focus would lead us to find more similarities than we expected. We might find two snowflakes, or stories, on opposite ends of the Earth that seem very similar. What we thought was one of a kind becomes common when compared to a broader selection.
Technology has had a similar effect in this way. With the rise of technology, communication has advanced in the recent past, connecting people across distance and language barriers. We can hear the ideas of anyone with access to the internet, thus broadening our perspective. But this has come with a rude awakening: we aren’t nearly as original as we thought. No matter what we do, odds are that someone has done it before. It seems as if we’ve run out of original ideas. When everyone has a platform to share their thoughts, the world becomes redundant.
“I don’t think that the communication and being able to find out what already exists is a negative thing,” said Segrist. “I think once you recognize that ‘okay, there are 50,000 groups already covering this song, does that mean that I shouldn’t do it?’”
The fear of repeating ideas hasn’t stopped people from continuing to be redundant. In 2014, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went viral. In the span of a couple months, around 17 million people posted videos that showed either themselves or someone else being doused with ice cold water to spread the word about the disease. Even though we all knew what was going to happen once the videos started, they kept us entertained. The same thing goes for the Mannequin Challenge, Harlem Shake, and almost every viral trend and every movie remake. So why do we cherish repetitiveness?
“I’d rather go and watch something that I have no idea about,” said Segrist. “But there are a lot of people who like the familiarity.”
With the recent hype for the new Beauty and the Beast movie and many other live-action remakes, it has become apparent that nostalgia partially drives our creativity.
“I think that, as people, we’ve been conditioned to enjoy these things,” said junior Ell Kinsey. “The ALS [Ice Bucket] Challenge, for example: we enjoy people’s reactions and we know that every reaction is gonna have a bit of its own little tweak, but we’re still interested in finding out what that little tweak is.”
Kinsey has written seven books in total and has self-published one, titled, “Honest Lies and the People Who Tell Them.”
In 2012, Kirby Ferguson gave a TED talk titled “Embrace the Remix.” He believes the main components of remixing are copy, transform, and combine.
“I think these aren’t just the components of remixing,” said Ferguson. “I think these are the basic elements of all creativity. I think everything is a remix, and I think this is a better way to conceive of creativity.”
He gave the example of Henry Ford’s quote, “I assembled nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work… Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable.” Progress is a result of previously found ideas coming together at the right time, to build off of their inspiration.
“You’ll always have some element to your story that no one else has thought of or that no one else has in their own story,” said Kinsey. “We’re all original people, sometimes it just doesn’t seem that way because original ideas can be similar.”
Now, I doubt we’ll ever find two snowflakes that are identical, but there are only so many possible structures in which they can form. At one point, there will have to be some redundancy. We enter the realm of redundancy when we only re-phrase what others have said before us. But that’s not to say that repeating ideas is a bad thing, we just need to use them as inspiration to build off of each other.
“There are no new ideas, there are only new combinations,” said Segrist. “What we have to do as creative thinkers in this day and age is look at what already exists, and then find a way to combine them in a way that no one has done before.”
Technology has made a perfect creative community to share thoughts and inspire others to add their own “tweak” to commonly held ideas and to progress the way we think about the world, instead of standing in place.
“Our creativity comes from without, not from within,” said Ferguson. “We are not self-made, we are dependent on one another. And admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness, it’s a liberation from our misconceptions. And it’s an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves, and to simply begin.”
