Creativity and New Media

New Media provides an amazingly simple way for us to share our creative ideas with others. Because new media is so accessible it becomes the perfect tool for fostering creativity. Youtube provides us with great examples of how ordinary people can create original content. All someone needs to produce a Youtube video is already available to them in their homes, and does not involve much more than a webcam and a computer. That is why user-generated content is so great- the person has full control over their creativity, being the writer, director and producer all at once. The distribution of user-generated content is also easy, and does not cost anything, since millions of people are already flocking to sites like Youtube on a daily basis. An article featured in The New Yorker "The New Math of Mashups" by Sasha Frere-Jones addresses some issues which arise when users choose to modify original content produced by someone else into a creative remake. The modification can be anything from layering music onto a video that is not its original soundtrack, to completely "mashing" two separate contents together, like two (or more) songs that become one. Because of many governing copyright laws, it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish what should be deemed as original creative content. On one hand, the content used in creating the mashup is often protected under copyright and is the original creative idea of someone else, and therefore it is sometimes seen as piracy to redistribute it without the permission of the artist. Yet on the other hand, the person who put the mashup together expressed creativity through the process of editing the content, and recognizingly altering it without denying its source. Therefore it becomes difficult to define mashups as piracy, while it also remains difficult to say that the artist no longer has a creative claim over the content. An example of this mentioned in the article is the famous remake of Jay-Z's Black Album, remade into The Grey Album by adding content from the Beatles White Album. While the album was very popular on the charts, EMI records was unhappy with the distribution of it, as the content used to create the music album did not originally belong to the person who created the new album. Yet others seem to recognize the creative effort put into remaking existing content into  new content. The New Yorker article mentions a remake of Madonna's "Ray of Light" and the Sex Pistol's "God Save the Queen" which gained recognition and approval from both artists. The most interesting point made by the author, is that these remakes can be seen as a sort of consumer-dissatisfaction, wanting to improve on something already existing to become better. New Media certainly plays an important role in fostering such creativity by enabling us to share content more freely when we choose to make those improvements, or simply express new ideas through the use of old content.