A Systems View of Creativity in a YouTube World

Abstract

Twenty-first century technologies have begun to reshape the sharing of idea, art, culture, and other forms of content through approaches such as internet crowdsourcing of data or ideas, applications for creating and sharing video, audio, images, and text across contexts, and new avenues devoted to sharing this content. We argue that new technological platforms allow creators to bypass traditional gatekeeping processes, providing the opportunity to not only showcase creative skills but also redefine a field’s classification of what is “creative” work. We frame our discussion within Csikszentmihalyi’s systems view of creativity, and how these new technological ways of creating and sharing may require us to rethink this model. We suggest that such a rethinking of the systems view of creativity can have significant implications for the use of digital technologies in education.