Affording to Share

How did we ever survive? 20 years ago, people used to write letters; ink and paper! Neanderthals. We've come to so far and we're all the better for it...or are we? Well, the short answer is yes we are, the long answer is sort of. There's a few dangers of the information age I'd like to pay heed to, but that's a lot of material to cover. So today I'm going to share the problem it poses to creativity.

Ye Olde Tale (please read in a pretentious old British accent...if it's not too much to ask)
Tis' 1802 (at least) and Clarence DuPont has stumbled upon a glen of unimaginable beauty. The beauty of this glen inspires Clarence to seek out a means to express his humbled affections. He tells the local stable-hand whose lack of education frustrates Clarence, that was not a fulfilling apportion of the splendor of this glen. That night Clarence cannot sleep for the gorgeous glen eats away at him, how can this locale not be known to all; it must! Clarence begins work on a poem, painting and companion hymn about the glen he dubs, Heaven's Touch. Congratulations Clarence, you are now an artist and future generations will forever know the beauty you saw in that glen. Your estate and legacy will live on in your children forever.

The DuPont bros will return.

The Modern Reboot (read this is a hipster tone cause it's contemporary)
Meet Clarence DuPont, or as he is known to his friends, The Big CeeDee yo. He got lost looking for signal on his Blackberry while on an accidental trip outside the house. Clarence stumbles upon a beautiful glen, "Wow this is pretty sweet." Clarence takes a photo with his Blackberry and uploads it to Facebook. Well done Clarence, your estate and legacy will be forgotten as soon as your friend (Jimmy 'Cockroach' Almeda) uploads a picture of that hot girl he randomly hooked up with on Friday.

Modern Art

Cynical? Yeah maybe. Thing is it used to be difficult to share our thoughts, we used to have to earn that right. It used to eat at us that our experiences would be lost to future generations (like tears in the rain), so we would actively immortalize it in creative ways. These days, we got it so easy we take it for granted, so why try harder. Funny stance for someone with a blog to have, but I think that the ease of sharing our experiences means we're apathetic to our own and other's experiences. Can you imagine half the people on FML decided to turn their experiences into a painting, poem, novel or movie? A lot of work maybe, but it'd certainly last longer than a status on FB.

Now there will always be artists, because there will be people who make art no matter what. That cannot be stopped because the human condition to document experience will always be instinctual (hopefully). At the end of the day, what price do we pay for the information age? Well for one we might be losing out on this generations Picasso because he has BBM and maybe that's too much of a price to pay.

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary" - Pablo Picasso.