So are Lol cats a sign of increasing creativity in society as Clay Shirky argues in his book "Cognitive Surplus" or should people better watch the Sopranos like Johan Lehrer of Wired magazine proposes?
I think the whole debate about consumption versus creation is beside the point. Especially Lehrer gets his creation and consumption completely mixed up. If you are writing about your TV consumption (like he did) it is actually creation. In any case, creativity does not spring out of a vacuum, it is always triggered by something that has been experienced or consumed before. If you write a Wikipedia article, you (hopefully) consumed a lot on the subject before. (Or maybe Lehrer gets his divine inspirations, if not from the Sopranos, directly from God?)
And the tools for creation have always been available, if people felt inclined they could have put captions to cat photos before the internet was available. So what has really changed with the Internet? It has given people an audience and the possibility to connect with like minded people. This turned out to be a huge motivator for creating things that only your internet community could possibly understand and like. Subcultures emerge that share special characters like ceiling cat and basement cat:
And insider chokes, running gags and even a special language:
In many ways, it is those thriving subcultures and idiosyncrasies that make the web exiting and not the streamlined sleek branded webpages. However, like almost anything this is a double edged sword and we can all think of some groups like neo-nazi organisations or paedophiles that we would prefer not to connect and thrive on the internet. But is the web in this respect really any worse then society as a whole?
If society is full of consumerism, banality, stereotypes, misogyny and violence then this is what we will encounter in the net as well. Of course the computer and the internet are special media and in the way they allow people to connect and be sender and receiver (or creator and consumer) at the same time, however this does not mean that the medium is the message. Like books, TV, film or radio before computer and internet can be used for good or evil, stupidity and enlightenment. If we have the feeling that the internet is currently a tool of collective stupidity, a time waster and attention destroyer then it should be all the more important to show how it could be put to a more beneficial use. The alternative would be to stay away form it altogether and that would be too bad, because then we would miss all those LOL cats ;)
