Chris Lott

Scott Rosenberg—author of the fascinating Dreaming in Code and the always-interesting Wordyard blog—has a new book out that looks even more interesting than his first: Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.

There’s an excerpt up at Salon which doesn’t diminish my interest, but does rub me the wrong way just a little bit. Either Rosenberg actually believes what I am about to quote, or he doesn’t see the conflation he uses to make it plausible, or he doesn’t care to make a more nuanced argument. He writes:

According to this perspective, talent is a resource of fixed supply. The existing institutions of the publishing and broadcast world are already doing an efficient and thorough job of finding all that talent and giving it a platform. And all this other stuff that’s spewing forth from the Web’s profusion of blogs and podcasts and videos? It’s just dross that obscures the real talent’s output.

Beyond the obvious arrogance, this view misreads and underestimates the Web in several ways. It’s a mistake to think of human creativity as a kind of limited natural resource, like an ore waiting for society to mine; it is more like a gene that will turn on given the right cues.

I can’t disagree with where Rosenberg is going, but not only is the idea of talent as a limitless resource wrong on its face, but it’s not “obvious arrogance” to keep that fact in mind when considering the media and artistic landscapes that the web is part of.

The idea that there is limitless talent is just another take on that warm, particularly American, and ultimately harmful mythos that anyone is capable of doing everything if they just (gosh darn it!) work hard enough. But there’s no evidence that this happy fiction has any truth to it… and plenty of evidence, in the shape of the world of art and media around us, that it’s untrue. It’s easy—and it feels good!–to maintain this illusion as often as we can, despite it’s harmful consequences (just look at our train-wreck of an educational system to see some of them). But put yourself or a loved one in a situation where their life or livelihood depends on the skill of another—undergoing delicate brain surgery, say—and you know as well as I do that you’re going to want the surgeon that has not just trained and worked to become the best, but who did so with the most generous helping of talent to capitalize on.

But Rosenberg’s second paragraph above is true, thanks to a conflation of talent and creativity. Talent is clearly a limited resource. Creativity is not. Anyone can, and should, create. That is a fundamentally fantastic characteristic of the read/write web. They might not have any talent at writing in general or the specific forms they choose to utilize. But in most of the important ways that’s not the point.

A more nuanced argument could go along a few different lines. You could say that, since everything is news to someone, there’s no need for the traditional focus on that kind of creation which will appeal to the most people. You could argue from the perspective of the positive aspects of self-expression and creative activities regardless of the talent one has (or doesn’t have). You could argue that while talent is limited, it’s very difficult to know where those limits are—and impossible to know in advance—so there’s no harm in acting as if there’s no practical limit. You could argue that limits on talent aren’t important because it isn’t really about how much talent there is, but how many talents, because each person must find theirs (this isn’t a philosophy that can be proven, but at least it takes into account the very obvious condition of individuals having little or no talent for particular activities, despite their effort). The last sentence quoted above goes in this direction, but because an important change has been made—from talent to creativity, which are not synonymous—it doesn’t quite get there.

The important point being made by Rosenberg still stands, of course: the old rules don’t apply. But it’s not because there’s no such thing as talent and it’s not because there’s a limitless supply of talent to be had… it’s because in one important operative, functional sense, one reason that talent mattered—as a way to determine prioritization of access to limited resources for publication and sharing—has become relatively unimportant. That’s a huge, fundamental change, the importance of which can’t be overstated… but let’s not use it to perpetuate a myth of endless talent and absolute equality which, ironically, serves to undermine our culture’s support for that already beleaguered natural resource.

Apparently there’s a cottage industry built on the premise that the existence of predecessors, colleagues and context proves that individual genius and creation is an inconvenient myth. I’d read Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker column "In the Air" when it first appeared, and it rubbed me wrong even then, but I’ve since had occasion to browse around a bit more and discovered even more illogical, confusing writing on the subject. For example, Keith Sawyer’s book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (here’s a representative excerpt) and bits and pieces from Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. Approximately 1.2 gazillion more in this strange genre can be found by invoking Google…

Some fundamental flaws inform almost everything I’ve read on the subject, most significantly a consistent lack of logic. That no creative individual works in total isolation, that creative acts occur in a context and ultimately as part of a tradition, that artists have friends, colleagues and competitors, that the best and most creative steal and stand on the shoulders of giants is both unquestionably true and essentially irrelevant to the existence of individual, solitary genius in any realistic sense of the adjectives. Only in the flimsiest straw-man arguments would anyone maintain otherwise and, in case case, the rather easy task of proving that the aforementioned exist and occur does nothing to disprove the latter.

It’s certainly true that the Romantics forcefully drew our attention to the activity of solitary creative genius, just as the industrial revolution shifted a large part of the Western focus from agrarianism to the power of mechanical devices and analytics. But no one uses the latter as an argument that calculating machines and factory production don’t really exist. We aren’t talking about flat-earthers or failed cosmologies, but simple, observable phenomenon. Coleridge and Wordsworth may have corresponded about– and deeply discussed– their work, but this doesn’t change the fact that, in the end, they spent untold hours facing the empty page alone before, during and after those conversations.

Similarly, the existence of independent, parallel discoveries– Newton and Leibniz discovering calculus– does nothing to render individual genius a myth. If anything, it reinforces it because, again, only a fictional argument exists that individual creative genius means sole creative genius. Leibniz and Newton possessed intellects of the highest order and only the fact that they independently and individually executed their profound work makes their story of any interest at all!

Gladwell and Sawyer should sit down and talk because together they could get at the whole truth. Sawyer makes great hay of the fact that stellar moments of creativity occur in jazz in group settings, where musicians are feeding off one another. This can’t be explained by the focus on the individual, Sawyer maintains. Gladwell has become (in)famous with his theory in Outliers that genius comes not from innate ability but from context and practice– 10,000 hours of practice, to be exact. Recognizing that the source of genius (nature, nurture, innate, learned) isn’t actually relevant– I’ll come back to that shortly– it is useful to consider two things about the example of jazz performance. First, as noted earlier, there is always a context for the creative act. Johnny Hodges’ mournful, goose-bump inciting "Blood Count" solo couldn’t exist as it does without Duke Ellington and the rest of the musicians, not to mention Strayhorn’s composition and recent, early passing. But does this lessen Hodges’ individual brilliance? And could this unforgettable moment of undeniable synergy have happened if Hodges (and Ellington, and Strayhorn) hadn’t spent the necessary, lonely, individual hours in the woodshed practicing their craft with no one but their own fears and frustrations and excitement to keep them company? You know they did their 10,000 hours and then some.

My suspicions– given the preponderance of these attempts to debunk the importance, even the existence, of individual creative accomplishment– is that most of this activity stems from natural desire (to accomplish great things), insecurity (that one may not be able to accomplish those great things), and an– I think uniquely American– ethos of bootstrap-pulling self-help and social leveling. This conception of accomplishment maintains that no one is born with any innate advantage over another, or at least none that can’t be matched with enough hard work. In an important way, this framing is an important counterbalance to the tendency for people to give up on their own endeavors and/or not grant a proper amount of respect to the hard work necessarily involved in creation regardless of how talented the creator might be.

Carrying this happy illusion consistently to the extreme, denying the existence of– and so entailing no obligation to facilitating or providing for– the hard, lonely individual work of genius, is dangerous… and perhaps never more so than now, when the insistent, overriding focus is on the (undeniably valuable, but not sole) characteristics of groups, social networks, collaboration (which will have to be the subject of another post; I value collaboration, but am suspicious of its very existence when it comes to creation and have yet to see an instance where it exists as anything more than turn-taking, no matter how refined) and collective intelligence. Individual creatives have always worked, to some degree, in opposition to the machinery of the everyday, but I fear the loss of the very capability to create the most beautiful things and make the largest leaps of invention if the machine becomes all and we, necessarily, live only inside it.

I won’t pretend to understand most (much!) of Beckett’s Nohow On, but there are two phrases in it that have stuck with me since the dizzying experience of reading those three slim volumes. The opening of the third movement “Worstward Ho”:

“On. Say On. Be said on. Somehow on. Til nohow on.”

Coupled with its famous closing:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This extremely loose couplet is Beckett’s exhortation to the tune of “try, try again” or “outwrite the bastards” but with higher stakes than a good poem or story… Beckett is reminding us that to say and do– repeatedly– is to be and and it is imperative that we keep at it until there is nothing else.

I was reminded of this extremely loose couplet while reading “Quantity Breeds Creativity” at Lifehack. There are two obvious educational aspects here which sometimes get overlooked (particularly if you believe, as I do, that the creative process is one of the most important parts of learning):

First, creativity isn’t efficient. There has been a lot of focus in the past few years on network effects, collectives and connectives, learning community and collaboration, much of which has explicitly or implicitly embraced a desire for efficiency. In my experience, creativity is most often fuzzy, vague, messy and characterized by a feeling of not really being sure what one is doing until they have done it. Creativity is driven by a variety of overlapping and sometimes partially opposing forces of experience, knowledge, and desire. In between making something great and making nothing lies a whole lot of making the mundane, mediocre, inessential, and irrelevant. Making something finally real– and thus being in the world– is harnessing the wisdom of the crowd of one… our multiplicitous self.

Second, creativity depends on repetition. This is really an extension of the lack of efficiency. We know from other aspects of our lives that where there is less efficiency there must be more effort to achieve the same goal. There’s a limited– but important!– amount that can be achieved by waiting for the intersection of the perfect moment and the muse. I’m not discounting the inspired stab in the dark, but most creative thought emerges from repetition, and most of that repetition will be, if not failure, something other than success.  Flannery O’Connor once said that she wrote every day because who knew if a day she skipped might have been the day she would choose well?

I see ramifications of ignoring these two facts at work in the classroom all the time. As educators we try to find the most efficient way of teaching, the combination that– when right– will facilitate a particular learning process, frustrated when it doesn’t “work.” It’s not wrong, of course, to want to be efficient– we all have limited time and resources– but I wonder how often we go too far or simply hope for too much clarity in a process that is so individualized. Educators and learners alike often don’t put the tools, concepts, or techniques to work often enough and for long enough to really understand them. If lightning doesn’t strike immediately or consistently enough, promising and productive paths are abandoned.

There’s a bit of magic in the process where wholes become more than the sum of their parts and tools and creativity are melded. No matter how clearly and often I try to explain the value and nuance of blogging, for example, it must be engaged regularly and for a length of time before those lessons become real. It was the same with regular paper journals before and it will be the same when we have cyborg monkey servants in the future. It isn’t luck that these proven models work for some but not for others, it is a product of practice (of the repetitious kind that leads to the Zen kind). To end with a sports analogy to complement the video, think of Arnold Palmer’s famous response to the accusation that a tough shot out of the rough he had just made was luck: “All I know,” Palmer answered, “is that the more I practice, the luckier I get.”

[linktribution: Doug Belshaw]