What was originally supposed to be a short post on creative thought processes, now has turned into a brief analysis of originality and what I perceive as downsides to creativity and content creation in todays postmodernist popular culture. Thoughts? ---------------------------------------------- Recently, as a content creator ive found it increasingly difficult to create anything. From music, to photography ive become afraid of falling into this increasingly popular postmodern trend of relying on throwbacks. In some ways its quite scary how much of popular culture is dictated by throwbacks to decades such as the 60s or more recently the obsession with the 80s whether it be fashion or musical styles etc. I myself am guilty of doing this in photography, trying to make my photos look like they were taken using a film camera through post processing of colour curves and film grain emulations etc. This is even evident in apps such as Instagram and the filters they provide, all throwbacks to create a certain look or aesthetic. My problem is that these throwbacks are like fads in that when someone introduces the idea initially, lets say bringing back 80s hairstyles, at first its certainly a fresh idea (though its originality is debatable), but then like a fad, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and then you start to see this idea rather quickly become overly-saturated and overused sucking any semblance of originality it once had. Consequently, this is why we hear the terms vintage and retro so much these days. I can agree that true originality doesnt really exist in that everything is inspired or born out of pre-existing ideas. For me, I would use the word original to describe something that I felt involved more individual thought that lays on top of a foundation of pre-existing or borrowed ideas. This to me demonstrates that the person acknowledges that whilst to a degree they are borrowing/stealing ideas, they are also acknowledging that for them to claim this newly formed idea as their own, they must incorporate a significant amount of their own individual thoughts and ideas. These days however, many aspects of popular culture seems to rely on recycled ideas that require minimum effort to conjure up. Take internet memes for example: so many people will post up a picture with a caption slapped on it and consider themselves a content creator and in the process actually believe they are funny. This irritates me beyond words because it pays no homage to the person who originally coined the idea of taking a photo, placing it in photoshop and adding a funny caption. Plus the ease of creating the content really does beg the question of how much the said person is actually contributing to the final product not to mention the same applying to the jokes and/or sarcastic tone in which they are presenting. Im not saying that good content cant be born out of these processes and if anything this is the current dilemma ive found myself in. I am attracted by some of the current popular ideas and trends, especially that of sampling old pieces of music and creating new music out of it, but by participating in these trends, I feel im am at risk of becoming a slightly different shade of the same colour, standing out only partially but owing most the credit of my creations to someone who actually made an effort to try to be original (as I previously defined it). Right now I find myself trying to imagine what would come next in the hypothetical future of popular culture in a bid to try and separate myself from this currently over-saturated market im apart of. Its incredibly hard to think outside the box on this one because in popular culture theres this common theme of rebelling against the traditional with an almost anything goes mentality. This can even be seen in peoples attitudes on the internet, for example, I perceive on Facebook that its almost cooler to be sarcastic/humour-driven when writing a status than it is to be serious about how youre feeling. Whilst im certainly generalising, I find it interesting and even a slight display of hypocrisy that a cultural shift that focuses on rebelling against the very idea of tradition and formality has itself become to some degree unaccommodating to some of the core ideas of modernism, some of which arent necessarily bad in my opinion. Maybe the solution to this dilemma would be to conform and create something serious and traditional? Or would that would just be another form of throwback? Ill leave it there before I have to justify an even longer list of generalisations xD
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 12:28:45 +0000