Creativity on the Internet

~ Laura

Sometimes  I'll go beyond the usual blogs and websites in my Google Reader and start clicking on other people's sidebars. Truthfully, I don't do it all that often anymore, because time is short and I can't keep up with the regulars on the blogs and twitter. I have access to too much information as it is. But when I'm in a particular mood (procrastination) and spend fifteen minutes or so doing some random clicking, I'm always delighted by the amount of creativity on the web.

Hobbies, like knitting, which used to be private activities are now public. People post grainy pictures of amazing sweater projects, refinished furniture, art projects, gardens. (Off topic — a friend just recommended this book by a knitter.) Obsessive collectors no longer keep the products of years of Saturday garage sales in lonely display cabinets in the basement. Instead, they post them proudly on the web. Thanks to the Internet, we now know that people are weirder and more creative than we realized.

I'm quite proud of the fact that I have some very creative friends and family. And, like so many other people, they've put their talents on the web.

Much to my parents' dismay, my brother spent a year after college in a band. They held up in a rental house in New Brunswick, NJ and made music and drank a lot. They never made it big, but they did have a lot of fun. Julian, the other guitarist in the band, has written a Spinal Tap-ish blog documenting the Year of Banding Dangerously. From Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny,

Julep Hootenanny is the demo tape recorded by Mrs. Henry, probably sometime in early Fall 1990 (exact dates are hard to reckon because most of the bands records were destroyed in a bizarre mid-nineties housecleaning incident). Once praised as "not exactly total garbage" by future MTV grandee, then local New Brunswick radio poobah, Matt Pinfield, Julep Hootenanny has since come to be regarded by certain members of the cognoscenti as a document that, as one critic put it "fills a much needed gap" in the recording history of Mrs Henry.

More serious and less self-indulgent blogging comes from Tammy, my sister in law, who is a gifted English teacher in a private middle school in New Jersey. She started two new blogs. In the first blog, she reviews YA books. The second blog is more of a journal, where she muses about her dual roles as parent and teacher. I especially loved her post about putting her little girl on the school bus for the first time,

But then, I saw her get on the bus. And then, I saw the bus drive away. I felt drawn back to that day 5 years earlier when I had to leave her in the hands of another. My throat closed up and tears started forming at the corners of my eyes. Finally, I understood the gravity of my position as a teacher. I will no longer see J's teacher on a daily basis, will no longer chat about what went well and what we needed to work on at home. My connection and communication with the teacher was now limited to curriculum night and the dreaded phone calls home.

Let's spread some love around the Internet today. What blogs and websites have you found that display major creativity?

Published by Laura

8 thoughts on “Creativity on the Internet”

  1. Axe Cop.
    5-year old boy writes the comic, his 29-year old brother draws it. I think there’s no way that this work could have happened (or at least been seen by anyone outside of their family) before the Internet. It’s funny as hell, but I also think it’s a pretty amazing incidental look at the genesis of imagination.
    There are so many other webcomics that couldn’t have existed in pre-Internet platforms. Hark A Vagrant might be my favorite of these.
    I think this is a basic dimension of the Internet that is easy to overlook. It’s not like the distinction between great work and crap has gone away, but in some domains (comics, some modes of video, cultural criticism, personal essays, some other kinds of writing) we’ve learned that there was a lot of great work which was never seen or produced under pre-Internet protocols. And a lot of hack work that got published or disseminated because its creators had inside connections to the people who controlled publication. I honestly think that some of the rage directed against the Internet comes from the hacks who expected to inherit access to the cultural megaphone through connections and now have to compete for attention against a huge band of far-more talented creators.

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  2. “Thanks to the Internet, we now know that people are weirder and more creative than we realized.”–thanks, Laura, fur summing up so neatly one of my favorite aspects of the Internet.
    Heidi Kenney’s blog: http://www.mypapercrane.com/ shows her own work, but also the weird and wonderful way she and her tattoo artist husband have decorated their house.
    Hyperbole and a Half is another great example of the wild and wonderful weird creativity of the Internet.

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  3. TV fandom. I never had any idea how much creativity was out there till I got involved with Buffy fandom 10 years ago. Fan art, fanfic, creative scholarship. Whenever you go to a pop culture conference, the best papers are always about Buffy.
    One of my favorite gossip blogs is Oh No They Didn’t, a Livejournal community. Go to any thread with a lot of comments and then read. A lot of people post gifs as comments, and they are hilarious and creative.

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  5. Laura,
    I’m passing your sister-in-law’s blog along to Melissa (http://www.thebooknut.com/); maybe it’ll help her network with the YA-book-blogger world. The more the merrier.
    One example which comes to mind is food-oriented blogs. It’s a serious question: would the whole multifaceted locavore/organic/better-eating movement even exist, or exist in the same way, without the internet? All of the ways in which individual farmers, consumers, shoppers, chefs, armchair restaurant critics, and more have networked…it’s really impressive if you think about it.
    Here in Wichita, there’s a local blogger who is doing great stuff to promote local food consumption–and her recipe’s are delicious: Local Local Food. Then down in Dallas, a lawyer friend of mine has for years worked meticulously on, then put online, exhaustive research about high-end chocolates, about regional bbq comparisons, and numerous other topics: DallasFood. And a restaurant entrepreneur I know in Portland has used his own blog to finance different projects and spread the word about food discoveries he’s made: ExtraMSG. And these are all just one tip of the iceberg.

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