The New Media Reader - Chapters 5-8

The organization of this group of articles was striking to me.  Chapters 5 and 8, chapters that I found particularly difficult to get through, were very technology driven.  Both articles were trying to show or prove how man and machine should or could be joined in order to solve complex problems more effectively and more efficiently.  In between these chapters were three chapters that focused on creativity, both how it is amplified, or depleted, by new technologies.

The chapters raised a big question for me, one that we have touched on in class, and one that I think chapters 5-8 struggled with, against one another, and at times, with one another.  What does technology, in all of its many forms, do to our creativity?  Does it enhance it, helping us to do things that we once were not able to do -- an example of this would be the LittleBigPlanet game-creator (see below), which allows gamers to create what they were only once able to dream-up.  Or does it threaten our ability to be unabashedly free and creative-- as the "Happenings" article implied, rarely do works of art maintain such raw creativity anymore in a world were fame is more important than what an artist can produce.