Grassroots Creativity: A Very Brief History
Date: August 25, 2008
Disclaimer to my regular readers: This entry is part of a six-entry series on online, grassroots creativity that I am writing about for a “Network Cultures” class at university. Excuse the academic tone!
In writing about grassroots creativity, one must first have an understanding of what the term “grassroots creativity” encompasses. Grassroots initiatives, which are often political in nature, are those started by everyday, common people, rather than by the status quo. Creativity is a more ambiguous term, but for the purpose of this series of posts, it will be associated with anything artistically created—visual, written or auditory—or any (probably open source) tool that may aid in these artistic creations. Though grassroots creativity has existed for a long time through more traditional and physical means, such as bulletin boards, letter writing and newspaper ads that brought groups together for creative purposes, the existence of the personal computer has fueled creative projects from its inception. In more recent years, the Internet’s breakdown of geographical barriers and social nature has encouraged more obscure and abstract creative projects to blossom all around the world.
Computer history, while mostly associated with business and formal education, has a creative underbelly that few commonly discuss. Take, for instance, a couple of the earliest personal computer games, Tennis for Two (1958) and Spacewar! (1962). The first minute of the video posted below shows the social nature of these games and speaks about the “rebelliousness” of their developers for turning expensive, important equipment into a gaming machine.
Creativity has never been far from the makings of computer equipment and its software, but it was only with time that computers, and later, the Internet, became tools of common people. Between the 60s and 80s, the Internet and network protocols were conceived, but it was the inception of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web in 1989 that forged the way for today’s Internet (Flew, p. 6). This has, over time, resulted in a number of informally organized groups that have created everything from collaborative fiction (see Fiction Wikia) and bulletin board text role playing games, to community-driven software like Firefox and music-discovery tools such as Pandora.
With over 20 percent of the world’s population having access to some form of the Internet today, “cyberspace” is a giant, sometimes loud, sometimes informative, connected and somehow at the same time disjointed community of all races and ages. This results in endless creative possibilities, oftentimes inexpensively organized by everyday people anywhere in the world, and shared with the same massive, mostly-faceless audience. Arguably, the Information Age has led or is leading us into a Creative Age, one where every user or online community is a possible producer.
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