The Future of Creativity

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

America, Dana Gioia says, is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups: one that passively consumes electronic entertainment, and one that uses technology but also participates in the arts, sports, exercise—and volunteers at three times the rate of the other group. The factor that differentiates these groups is not based on income, geography, or education, but simply on whether people read for pleasure and participate in the arts. In his Stanford speech, Gioia argued that “a child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.”

A National Endowment for the Arts study published in 2004 correlated a decline in literary reading with increased participation in a variety of electronic media and noted that it “foreshadows an erosion in cultural and civic participation” because literary readers volunteer, do charity work, and attend arts and sports events more frequently than their non-reading peers. The report predicted that “at the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century.”

Given what’s coming out of all these studies, it’s questionable whether tomorrow’s adults are learning to use the tools they’ll need to succeed. David Walsh, founder of the Minneapolis-based National Institute on Media and the Family, agrees that the changes raining down on our youngest generation are more enormous than those faced by any other. “Whenever revolutionary things happen in the world of technology, they have a big impact on society,” he says. “The printing press—that took us out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance. It would be naive to think this latest profusion of technology wouldn’t have a dramatic impact on the way kids are being raised.”

Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has recently focused his research efforts on the relationship between play and brain development in humans. “You put a subject into a CAT scan or MRI machine—which measure real-time blood flow into the brain—and you have that person looking at a virtual image, say a hand holding a ball, and then compare that to the person looking at an actual hand holding an actual ball.”

What goes on in the brain, Stuart says, is entirely different with each process: “The second one activates the frontal cortex and many other areas of the brain in a much more integrated way.” Virtual images stimulate the brain and stimulate imagination, he allows—but “it’s probably arousal without much integration with the whole of the brain.”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print