Theory

David Gauntlett

David Gauntlett is a British sociologist and media theorist who specialises in studying contemporary media audiences, the every making and sharing of digital media and the role of such media in self-identity and self-expression.

David Gauntlett

Creativity involves putting things together, ideas and materials to make something new.

The social dimension.It increases for feeling of embeddedness and feeling of participation in the world.

Making is connecting

This tree represents society it has to be sustained with nutrients which in this case is our creativity, people being able to participate and create within their lives. The pretty pink bird reminds us that it is not just a nice thing for individuals to be creative,

it is absolutely essential for society to flourish that people get the opportunity to make and share things rather than being consumers of things.

Society

People have been creative and making things for many hundreds of years.

Rozsika Parker talks about embroidery as a weapon of resistance that women were able to use to carve out their own thinking, time and space within their lives and you could say blogging for example meets all of these criteria.

John Roskin admired the gargoyles you can see on medieval cathedrals because within them you can see the individual spirit the creative maker just making something they wanted to make, didn’t need to ask for permission they were just doing what they wanted to do, its not fine art but it expresses something, and you can say these same ideas apply to YouTube today.

William Morriss took up Roskins ideas and developed them into a more community kind of model, explaining how people need to make the stuff of their own lives.

Ivan Illich similarly argues that people need to be able to shape and create their own environments, to create the tools by which they can use to stamp elements of their own personality upon the world in which they live.

History

Web 1.0 we have people making their own websites, but they’re individual gardens. They have built their own platforms and put them out there for people to see it.

The idea of web 2.0 is you have a big communal allotment where everybody pitches in and puts their stuff so you don’t need to own

your own website, you can add onto other websites such as YouTube and Wikipedia. These are sites where the more people are using them, the better they get.

Web 2.0