Question

Write a paragraph in about 100 words on the “Impact of Internet on Creativity”

Answer 1

While the web has facilitated a glut of unoriginal and trivial content, technology deserves some credit for lifting the barriers that inhibit creativity
Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 16.22 EST

Creativity is the ability to generate novel, useful ideas and innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas. With this in mind, 

it is tempting to suggest that technology has made us more creative: the digital revolution has clearly produced a large number of innovative products and services. Some of them have become multibillion pound companies and transformed a significant part of our lives. What these innovations have in common is that they level the gap between supply (of services or products) and consumer demand, much like with any effective entrepreneurial activity.

Aside from the obvious examples – Google, Airbnb, Uber, LinkedIn, Tripadvisor, Spotify and Whatsapp – there has been an explosion of creative activity in the technology space: there are over 3m apps, and 300 hours of YouTube video are uploaded every minute. According to some estimates, every two minutes we snap as many pictures as the entire population of the world did in the 1800s.

However, it would be naïve to imply that these activities are truly indicative of creativity, even if quantity does eventually lead to quality. For instance, the probability of taking a great photograph does increase when there are millions of Instagram pictures taken every day, and when 500m tweets are generated daily, it is highly probable that one or two will be funny.

Yet, much of the content people generate is trivial, unoriginal and forgettable. Prior to the internet it would have stayed in the minds of their authors, but our thoughts can now be broadcasted to the world as if they were worthy creations. The only thing that appears to have increased, rather substantially, is people’s self-perceived creativity: because they seem unable to filter out so many irrelevant ideas.
In fact, the web has done a great deal to kill people’s creativity. From the use of emojiin lieu of words, to the proliferation of pre-determined functions to express our views – liking, sharing, and, in some cases, disliking. These new universals of human interaction promote efficient – but lazy – behaviours so that we can devote more time to consuming more content. Although user-generated content has been growing exponentially in the past decade, much of it is noise and the result is that valuable and trustworthy information is now harder to find. In an age of overabundance and exuberance were everything is freely available but knowledge is hard to cultivate, this paradox highlights the importance of the less is more philosophy of life.

Curiosity evolved to make sense of the world and help us master our environments. Our prehistorical ancestors must have benefitted from taking on as much information from their surrounding as they could, paying attention to everything and turning into the ultimate learning machine. Yet in an age of information glut, the curious mind is forced to ignore as much of the available data as it can, in order to consume only what is nutritious.

This resembles the evolution of food and eating: although our brains are still programmed to maximise caloric intake, as if food were still scarce, in most of the planet what’s adaptive (eg desirable and healthy) is the ability to resist rather than consume most of the available food, because it lacks real nutritional value and makes you fat.
Hope it helps you!