HW Creativity

Since new media has opened unlimited realms of information passing from one end of the globe to another, it’s safe to say that creativity has elevated since its fruition. In short, it incentivizes and fosters innovation and creativity because free, accessible platforms allow for those who consume new media to reward those who advance it. Of course, that’s strictly speaking from an economic perspective. For the daily lives of creators, new media is simply an outlet to fool around, create skits, and develop short films of anything and everything. And this includes an elevation of famous works. New media does not exclude the advancement of previous creations; how else would be have recreated Star Wars? Or foster the idea that perhaps there’s needs to be a whimsical remake of the Grimm Brother’s scary-tales? A prime example of this is cited in Barnes’s article in the New York Times, where she discusses Nickelodean’s tolerance of consumers using their characters. She notes, “Nickelodeon… sees the humorous video as fair use of its copyrighted content…Our audiences can creatively mash video from our content as much and as often as they like…that was a very nice edit job by whoever did the SpongeBob mash” (Barnes).

So even with the introduction of patents, trademarks and copyrights leveling the grounds of piracy, there is still humor instilled for harmless recreations. After all, the battles picked on the grounds of piracy are selective. Because of this high degree of selectivity, creativity isn’t impeded out of fear that one would be sued for infringement; rather, these new laws allow for the public domain (in this case, new media) to create what it wants, and reap the rewards for one’s own creation, as opposed to copying and pasting. And this is self-evident with the rise in TV sitcoms, and other networks producing their own popular shows. HBO’s Game of Thrones, and Netflix’s Stranger Things all center on one specific genre and theme, but because of widespread availability for consumption, these companies can keep generating incredible content. The outreach today is incredibly vast, so with that, creators can capture large shares of an audience without too much trouble or resource.