We’re All Artists

The most positive change to the wiring in our collective brains is that technology has made creating art and engaging with creative media much easier. According to author Clay Shirkey, the internet has enhanced our “cognitive surplus” allowing us excess hours and brain power to pursue goals and activities. It’s likely that our usage of social media and other forms of interactive data consumption have replaced the more liaise fare television watching of yester-year. Social media web sites actively encourage users to share and interact with each other and it’s a common occurrence to see friends and colleagues sharing art that they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to share in the past.

“Once we stop thinking of time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social assets that can be harnessed, it all looks very different,” said Shirkey. “The build up of free time among the world’s educated population – maybe a trillion hours per year – is a new resource.”

Yes the internet may be responsible for the way we think, and yes it may be different to how we thought in the past but the internet isn’t going anywhere. Our lives are going to become ever more tied to the online world and the possibilities far out weigh the negatives. Of course the phantom vibration syndrome is annoying but our newly wired brains present us with a new world to explore so the small irritations we experience whilst evolving are really not a problem at all.