Social Creativity

While traditional media sharply distiguishes the author/performer from the reader/audience, new media encourages a mingling of these roles. In this project, you will conceive of a project that enlists others to help you realize (that is, make real) and elaborate a creative vision.

In essence, you will develop two examples of a creative format that can be imitated and replicated by others without their simply repeating the same joke or effect.

A Form That Is Both Specific and Open

In this assignment, you will enable others to develop creative and expressive contributions to your project, but do so within a unifying form, tone, and vision that is yours. The point is to provide a concept that is

1. specific and purposeful enough to give your site a consistency of statement, tone, and form--as if you had created all the entries yourself--but
   
   
2. suggestive and open enough to enable your contributors the opportunity to create something new and expressively individual.
   
   

Writing Rules and Guidlelines

One of the elements of the assginment is to write a set of rules and guidelines to describe the creation and form of a contribution.

In the world of social media, specifying a set of rules and guidelines for others to follow creatively can itself be an act of genius.

In this project, rules provide not only practical how-to steps for contributing, but guidelines to realize the creative potential of your project's format and vision.  

Together with models and examples, rules inspire rather than just limit.  

Write rules and guidelines that

1. are simple and clear
2. progress chronologically
3. describe a contribution's format
4. combine practicality with inspiration
5. offer insights into the creative technique of the sample contributions
6. suggest the intended goals, possibilities, and meaning of the project
   
   

See the page, "Sample Steps, Rules, and Guidlelines..."

Examples

Here are some examples of social creativity, which use the technique and philsophy of this assignment for various political, artistic, confessional, philosophical, or satirical purposes.

• Make Your Franklin (visual design)
• 50 Sad Chairs (photographic/verbal; not socially participatory, but could be)
• In Search of Oldton (fictional)
• The Victorian Meme Machine (academic; an example of a library inventing a social-creativity project to promote use of their archives)
• Sorry Everybody (political; from 2004, after George W. Bush's re-election in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. See also the rationale)
• Fleeting Stories (student example)
• Departures and Arrivals (student example)
• "Implementation" by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg (distributed narrative; see particularly the rationale page)
• PostSecret (confessional blog)
• Black People Love Us (satire; see especially the Your Testimonials! Page) (see also more about site creator Jonah Peretti)
• Uncyclopedia (satire; see Wikipedia's entry on Uncyclopeia since you can't trust Uncyclopedia's own "About" page)

 

Note how each of these examples enable contributors to participate creatively to producing the project, but each contribution is a variation or elaboration on the same idea, effect, or joke.

Criteria

1: that the project consists of a functioning web page containing the required content, and a 500-word (minimum) printed commentary. Conception and Online Aspects

2: how fully the conception and execution of the project recognizes the properties of New Media--while not slavishly obeying them necessarily--as defined by Janet Murray's chapter: Procedural, Encyclopedic, Participatory, Spatial (PEPS)

3: the extent to which the project attempts to inspire and enable contributors to be creative and to share that creativity socially.

4: how strongly the requested contributions are conceptually defined and unified by a common purpose, vision, tone, and/or attitude that is creative, as opposed to being straightforwardly documentary.

5: that the project specifically defines rules and guidelines for the contributions: a form or genre that gives shape to a contributor's creative impulses.

6: the degree to which the project demonstrates the author's technical grasp of the software, techniques, and work flows learned in class so far

7: how usably the project is visually designed and presented. Commentary

8: how thoughtfully the project is analyzed in a formal, well-written, grammatically correct commentary of at least 500 words (about 2 double-spaced pages)

9: how well the commentary explains the project's realization of (and/or negotiation with) Murray's PEPS

10: how well the commentary explains the project's parallels with examples of social creativity and New Media studied in class.

11. whether the commentary includes at least three, well chosen quotations (or very specific close readings of visual texts) from the class readings with page numbers indicated when appropriate, or from online examples.

12. whether all outside references in the commentary (including online examples or sources) are cited correctly using MLA-style in-text citation format and bibliographic documentation at the end of the commentary.

Resources

• CSS Zen Garden as example of the procedural nature of New Media
• New York Times article about Twitter in the Primaries
• Form as World View (Mikhail Bahktin)
• How to insert fake form fields (including Insert > Form > File Field).
  [Note: you are not expected to create working forms for this assignment. If you're interested, however, you can find steps for a working file field here.]