The world’s greatest innovations have never been exclusively created by one single person. They have always been built upon someone else’s work; modifying somebody else’s great idea and making it work for you.
Yet some people believe that the internet stifles our creativity (Elton John amongst them). We can access lifetimes of research and work with just a choice phrase punched into trusty old Google, why would we possibly want or need to think? Are we so bombarded with other people’s great ideas that we can no longer create our own?
I seriously doubt it. Would that mean that libraries, reference books, and textbooks are also impeding our ability to create and think? It provides us with a base for our own ideas, just as HTML, PHP, and other coding languages do for web developers. More traditional inventors weren’t/aren’t required to reinvent the wheel for their own innovations so why is the internet held to a different standard? Inspiration can come just as easily, if not more so, from online sources than more traditional ones.
The idea that the internet actually promotes creativity isn’t even restricted to web developers. Not too long ago, creating a new business was a pretty big deal. Tons of time, money, and effort had to be put into a new idea; not that it still isn’t now, but the internet has made entrepreneurship a whole lot easier. Ideas without financial backing withered away, but now you can share your ideas with the world for free or not very much at all. If your idea is truly creative, then it will stand out.
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I agree with you Jeff. Excuse the string of cliches, but the internet does indeed allow us to stand on the shoulders of others, rather than reinvent the wheel from scratch. With so much information available to us, we still haven’t answered all of our questions. All of our answers only spawn more questions. The only difference is, now more people have the opportunity to answer them.
If we have access to all of the world’s information almost instantaneously, why wouldn’t we use it? Why walk down the highway, when you can drive? It would be counterproductive to do otherwise.