Is creating art using your power for good?

Yesterday, a bunch of sites linked to or featured this video. Because I’m generally not a YouTube video of the day kind of person, it takes a bunch of sites to endorse one before I’ll watch it. This one is amazing.

It features a French guy singing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” a cappella. That in and of itself is not the amazing part. What is amazing is that he sang each part of the song on a different voice track and then combined all 64 tracks to make this video. Plus, I gotta admit, guys with French accents singing “Thriller” — pretty charming.

Watching the video reminded me of an argument I had with one of my sisters over the weekend. A group of us were talking about that Bike Hero video and how much time it must have taken. My sister was under the assumption that it was a few dudes sitting around in their basement with nothing better to do (she didn’t realize until later in the discussion that it was a viral marketing video).

“Why can’t they use their powers for good?” she asked.
“Creating art is using their powers for good,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “They use all that time and energy to create a bike hero video when they could be solving the world’s problems, combating poverty. . .” she said. Did I mention that she’s a social worker?

The argument continued with me on the of creative expression and art being a valuable use of time, and her saying we should be channeling that artistic passion into something more “useful.” For the sake of sanity, I will leave aside the discussion about the usefulness of art.

Instead, I wanted to talk about how creating art (whether it be an acappella version of Thriller using 64 separate voice tracks or a blog post featuring a macro shot of your uneaten lunch) is a valuable use of time and much better than a lot of things you could be doing (like watching TV).

However, as I was formulating my hypothesis and arguments my boss, Mark, sent me a link to an edited transcript of a speech Clay Shirky gave about Cognitive Surplus. Shirky explains, what I was thinking about, in a much more direct and intelligent way.

Basically, Shirky says that we’ve got a big surplus of talent, energy, and thinking because we’ve been storing it up by wasting our time watching TV for the past 50 or so years. He said people are starting to use this surplus by creating and sharing things.

Shirky goes on to say that while many people think that this whole creating and sharing things on the web is a fad, it’s not. It’s going to be the new societal norm. Which is really kind of thrilling if you think about it. Shirky explains it like this:

And her final question to me was essentially, “Isn’t this all just a fad?” You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, “This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before,” and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into. But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Read the rest of Shirky’s article, because my brief summary doesn’t do it justice. He is offering up some fascinating theories about the future of the media. It’s actually really exciting.