Creativity

How New Media fosters Creativity

Media has proven to be a powerful tool of not only social transformation but also a driver of creativity and innovation. Particularly social media has been on the front in facilitating this advancements in creativity. For instance, Twitter has been and is a platform that not only inspires but also fosters creativity. Twitter offers a platform that allows people to follow each other and to exchange ideas. Creativity is fostered when people follow others with whom they may not necessarily share the same ideas or they may not agree on various issues. As such, when these different ideas are exchanged new ways of doing things are created. Twitter is a good example in exhibiting how engaging people with different ways of thinking and ideas from theirs can map way out into the future of their business. Through such pursuit, Twitter has demonstrated how a company can tap into the creativity of its customers. As people, interact on twitter, the company has been out trying to get the customers to decide what they want twitter to be for them; what features they like and what they want further enhanced and made better. For instance, if users are using a certain feature more often than not, Twitter looks into how it can improve the feature as well as make other features more interactive and generally the platform more user friendly. Features such as #tags for marking certain topics were brought by twitter users and have been successfully adopted by other users (Miller, 2009).

New media also enhances crowdsourcing of ideas and opinions. This is a very important aspect of new media, especially in sharpening creativity because some of the ideas that we come up with sometimes are not well polished and they are kind of half baked may be because we have not taken time to think through all the angles of the idea. Social Platforms like Twitter can really be instrumental in testing such ideas and getting public opinion so that, the ideas are well polished and become perfect and doable. Twitter was back testing a feature called Lists with a small group before it released it to all twitter users (Miller, 2009). This is an example of crowdsourcing.

Reference

Miller, C. (2009). Twitter Serves Up Ideas from Its Followers. New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html