Exercise 1: The evolving media landscape

To what extent social media affects creativity?

Social media has become a part of our daily life. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, micro blogging, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. Examples include Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger and Reddit. (Source: Lateral Action)

Daily media usage (Source: Wired)

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

(Source: Epipheo)

Advantages of using the social media to serve creative people as following:

(Source: TheSamTsui YouTube)

1. Source of Inspiration As many social networks started to support different types of media including images, animated GIFs, videos and sound tracks. This extended support allows both designers and artists to explore new ideas and inspirations for their own projects. Specialized social media networks allows designers to connect with their peers to view content related to their interest. For example, Vimeo.com is a video social media network that is more specialized in artistic and professional video footages. (Source: Designorate )

2. Creates more creative collaborative work Youtube.com is a platform that allows users to collaborate with different individuals around the world to produce collaborative work which contains generic videos or inspirational smash-ups. For example : Thinking Out Loud / I'm Not The Only One MASHUP (Sam Tsui & Casey Breves)

3. Learning and Expanding Knowledge Many of the educational institutions and design bodies use different social networks to share their news and resources. Many students prefer to follow these bodies on social network websites because it is easier to reach and allow them to follow all the resources and projects directly from their Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profiles.Although there is debate in considering social media as source for academic learning, many scholars are starting to use social media to share their research papers and presentations such as researchgate.net, academia.edu, andslideshare.com. (Source: Designorate )

4. Learning Groups Social groups such as Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, and Google Plus groups were built to gather people with the same interests to share ideas and collaborate together. Many students and designers have started to build learning groups based on schools, classes, and even specific courses. In these groups, students and designers use groups as method to learn, discuss assignments, and share projects together. The digital learning group replaced many of the local school learning groups because it allows students to communicate during travels or summer breaks.Sharing images and video content indicates higher engagements and exposure compared with text status on Facebook. Social networks that are based on visual arts and design such as Pinterest have proven success in the social market.