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Grassroots Creativity: Early 21st Century

When it comes to grassroots creativity, reliable tools are necessary for accomplishing some things online. It was not until this century that many online tools have even been created, much less made usable and reliable for the average user. Comparing the Internet of the 90s to that of the early 21st century is very nearly like comparing night to day. The 90s, despite the Internet boom and bust, still represented infrastructural growth for the Web in many ways. Dialup speeds were slow, and tools for users, particularly reliable ones, were scant. The nature of the Web during the 90s was not very supportive of creative projects or designs. The early 21st century changed this, however, introducing both new tools and large communities.

One of the earliest tools important for creative ventures that was developed in 1999/2000 was GarageBand. GarageBand, while originally a competitor of MP3.com, would later, in 2003, pick up where the by-then-defunct MP3.com community left off, thanks to Trusonic. GarageBand was (and still is as of 2008) a community of mostly independent and emerging musicians. Members could upload their music and review other musicians’ works as well. For music lovers, this connected the Internet, discovering music and direct communication with new musicians, all at once. Like MP3.com, GarageBand went on to pave the way for similar services, especially as broadband adoption increased. (As of 2008, one of GarageBand’s latest innovations is and iTunes/iPod service, Gpal.)

Musicians weren’t the only ones to find the Web a much friendlier place by the 21st century. Writers could find a home in blogging services, like Blogger, which was created in 2000 by Pyra Labs and bought by Google in February 2003. While the 90s had free hosting services, like GeoCities, for users to upload content and make web pages with, Blogger, and blogging services like it, gave many users the tools they needed to be able to create content, without any needed skill other than their writing.

Along with Blogger in 2000, one of the Internet’s best known art communities, deviantART, was launched. deviantART, which had humble beginnings (see an archived screen capture of deviantART in 2000), was created by three individuals, Scott Jarkoff, Angelo Sotira and Matthew Stephens. The first truly usable service of its kind, deviantART has become the largest art community in the world and ranks 116th in terms of traffic, according to Alexa.

Between 2000 and 2003, writers, musicians and artists had a whole new, online world opened to them. Likely one of the most important developments during this time, though, was more on the technical side. CSS, or cascading style sheets, had been around for quite some time, but little widespread knowledge of its workings, as well as initially poor browser support of its finer details, left many sites plain and clunky, since design was not separated from more content–limiting both designers and content creators, alike.

The reason CSS is mentioned here for being important to grassroots creativity in the first few years of the 21st century is because its development, support and use is closely linked to the tools many users work with today, particularly those that feature easy-to-use interfaces. CSS Zen Garden, an ongoing CSS design project started in 2002, shows how much can be accomplished with CSS. It is interesting to compare the designs created from 2002 to those created even in 2003; the evolution in design and usability is clearly evident.

This change in design standards would go on to create the Web and its tools as we know them today.

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