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DIGITAL POSIBILITIES
The Context of the Work
The main idea of the paper is to try to understand how simple idea can grow into a global movement and what digital posibilities is possibe to use in this case. We will discuss what the digital is, and how it can affect the social. The research question is to understand what is collective behavior and what is the role of social media in social movement. We will describe what is digital media and how it is helping to realise different ideas and processes. We will give an example of social movement from Estonia and which social media platforms are used.
In theoretical chapter we will write about ideas and creativity. What does it mean and how successful products are produced. We will try to discribe how the various mechanisms come together in an overarching theory for how ideas develop. We will try to explore how new ideas are innovated and what influences the course of their development into becoming more broadly accepted.
"Everything you can imagine is real," – Pablo Picasso
INTRODUCTION
Technology has infiltrated every aspect of our lives. It's inevitable that our devices begin to reflect our civic aspirations - our desires to connect with others and to contribute to the world around us. We need to understand the skills and attitudes that individuals and organisations need if they are to thrive in today's world. At an individual level we define digital capabilities as those which equip someone to live, learn and work in a digital society. At an organisational level we need to look beyond the capabilities of individuals and consider the extent to which the culture and infrastructure of an institution enables and motivates digital practices. The main idea of the paper is to try to understand how simple idea can grow into a global movement and what digital posibilities is possibe to use in this case. We will discuss what the digital is, and how it can affect the social. The research question is to understand what is collective behavior and what is the role of social media in social movement. We will describe what is digital media and how it is helping to realise different ideas and processes. We will give an example of social movement from Estonia and which social media platforms are used. In theoretical chapter we will write about ideas and creativity. What does it mean and how successful products are produced. We will try to discribe how the various mechanisms come together in an overarching theory for how ideas develop. We will try to explore how new ideas are innovated and what influences the course of their development into becoming more broadly accepted.
THEORY
Ideas and Creativity
Ideas
There are three general perspectives when it comes to the origin of ideas. These belong to Psychology, Philosophy, and Anthropology.
Psychology. For psychologists, ideas come from the brain, the mind. They’re the product of synapses firing and connecting creative dots between thoughts and images and physical responses. The unconscious mind, where great ideas are thought to reside, also houses the bulk of our creative insights. Additionally, through the perspective of psychology, our own individual creativity grows exponentially when we’re exposed to the creative ideas of others.
Philosophy. Philosophers, especially the likes of Descartes and Locke, believed ideas came from the soul. Objects and words caused ideas to form from intangible thoughts and because of this, ideas were the mental representation of all things manifested in the brain. The philosophical perspective on ideas was that only human beings were capable of having them, that they were spontaneous and reflexive. All one had to do was simply breathe and an idea would form.
Anthropology. Anthropologists, especially those of the social and cultural variety, focus on the way our surroundings shape and mold our thoughts and ideas. Innovation, prosperity, exchange – these are aspects of a communal society where members share their thoughts and bring ideas to life by working together instead of apart. The concept of diffusion is part of the anthropological perspective on ideas. How ideas spread from culture to culture is just as important as how they’re created.
Creativity
Creativity is often related to thinking of novel and appropriate ideas, as compared to innovation, which in this context focuses rather on the successful implementation of those ideas either within an organization or into the market (Trott, 2008).
Creativity has often been characterized as a multifaceted construct as it can be recognized in many ways. Depending on the context, creativity may refer to a human ability, a process, or a resulting product.
Creativity as a human ability. Historically, this was the first scientific view on creativity and dates back to the 18th century when researchers became interested in the ability and background of individuals who were responsible for extraordinary achievements. Since then, discussions have continued as to whether creative behaviour is a specific ability or the combination of several traits. Another perspective is to regard creativity as an attribute that someone may have to a greater or lesser extent. One more research concludes instead that everyone has the potential to be creative - but to varying degrees, depending on a multitude of personal and environmental factors.
Creativity as process. The process characteristics of creativity - or, put simply, 'the creative process' became early a topic of interest to researchers, but also to writers and artists. Wallas (1926) proposed four distinctive phases, namely: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Schuler and Görlich (2007) introduced another process model that integrates previous research and extends it to core phases of innovation. The eight stages are as follows: (1) problem finding (discovering, identifying and defining relevant problems); (2) information search (knowledge and retrieval of relevant information); (3) concept combination (reorganization of existing categories, finding links and analogies); (4) idea generation (ideation, characterized by originality, fluency, flexibility); (5) solution development (translation of the original idea in a functional solution); (6) idea evaluation (comparison of different solutions, finding pros and cons); (7) adaptation/customization (redesign, fitting of the original idea) and (8) implementation (communication, persuasion, integration). Although it is depicted as a sequential model (as most others are as well), all stages must be understood is being interdependent to a certain degree. Often it is necessary to return to a previous stage in order to achieve an adequate (product) solution. While stages (1) to (4) represent the classic phases of 'creativity' (developing ideas in response to a perceived problem), stages (5) to (8) relate especially to 'innovativeness' (successful realization/commercialization).
Creativity as a product. For a product to be creative, it has to be new. Newness is closely associated with the term originality. Moreover, usefulness is often attributed to creativity as well, in the sense of a social value. Over the years many adjectives and situational factors were applied to creativity. Jackson and Messick (1964), for example, used unusualness, appropriateness, transformation and condensation as criteria for assessing creativity. Whereas unusualness and appropriateness of the creative achievement may be used synonymously with originality and usefulness, respectively, transformation relates to the extent to which common barriers and limitations are overcome, and condensation to the complexity bundled in the (simple) problem solution.
The notion that new, successful products are produced as a result of someone's bright idea is a myth, and not based on reality. Creativity does not arrive like a bolt from the blue. The true creators of our time, for example Edison, Curie, Einstein and Picasso, all worked very hard and in a focused way to bring their big ideas to life.
Mechanisms of the Theory of Ideas
There are five key components that serve as the building blocks for the overall theory what presented Prateek Goorha and Jason Potts. They are: perspectives, aspects, consolidation and realizability, contextual sensitivity, and recursiveness. While the theory has several moving parts, the essential message is simple: ideas seek long-livedness, and idea spaces determine the mechanisms. A key function that the theory of ideas serves is in suggesting why this assumption - that ideas ought to be seen as a fun-damental unit of agency - is not misguided. It provides a common basis for considering ideation in humans across different contexts, as well as in intelligent systems of machines. An individual is represented as an idea space in the theory of ideas, making her an embodiment of her ideas, on the one hand, but also making this embodiment less bound by her physical body, on the ohter instead, an individual is conceptualized by the body of ideas that her idea space represents, which may be shared with other idea spaces in specific ways and holds the potential for continually being reshaped.
The possibilities that deep learning algorithms provide in build-ing large-scale artificial intelligence systems make the relevance of this approach yet more vivid. Each contributing unit, or information- gathering node, in a system of artificial intelligent machines is an indi-vidual idea space that can generate tomes of contextual information that can be stored in repositories that constitute collective idea spaces. By being able to parametrically describe the equivalents in the theory for subjectivity, limits to awareness, and density of ideas, such systems operate in more programmable and tractable ways. This makes them seem innocuous. However, these features are also what makes them amenable to scalability to a degree that is inconceivable for humans. To the extent that the interaction effects across idea spaces can have genuinely insidious side effects, those who are chary about AI would seem to have a legitimate cause for concern. While it is true that an idea does not ‘fear’ death or ‘get excited’ at the prospect of becoming famous, ascribing a general purposive nature to ideas enables to explain their nature and understand some outcomes that transcend disciplinary boundaries. At the outset, the individual would need to possess the requisite awareness of all the component ideas in order for the ideas to ever become associated. Even if the ideas all belong to the same sub-space, the association would require that the individuals are able to use one or more of the extant subspace metarules, or mechanisms, effectively. When an appropriate mechanism does not exist, a potential new rule may first require the invention of a new mechanism. Innovating new ideas, therefore, places a degree of emphasis on an individual having access to core rules of a disciplinary mechanism as crisp ideas with her own subspace. To the extent that the ideas draw upon different subspaces, this association is further encumbered by the ability to use the right set of mechanisms.
Collective Behaviour and Social Movements
Collective behavior is a term sociologists use to refer to a miscellaneous set of behaviors in which large numbers of people engage. More specifically, collective behavior refers to relatively spontaneous and relatively unstructured behavior by large numbers of individuals acting with or being influenced by other individuals. Relatively spontaneous means that the behavior is somewhat spontaneous but also somewhat planned, while relatively unstructured means that the behavior is somewhat organized and predictable but also somewhat unorganized and unpredictable. One of the common form of collective behavior is the social movement. The study of social movements exploded in the 1960s and 1970s. A social movement is an organized effort by a large number of people to bring about or impede social, political, economic, or cultural change. It is an important form of collective behavior that plays a key role in social change. Collective behaviour and social movements are just two of the forces driving social change, which is the change in society created through social movements as well as external factors like environmental shifts or technological innovations. Essentially, any disruptive shift in the status quo, be it intentional or random, human-caused or natural, can lead to social change.
Digital Media and Digital Society
In the early 21st century, digital media and the social have become irreversibly intertwined. Simon Lindgren explores what it means to live in a digital society. Media are tools, channels, platforms and strategies which we can use to obtain, produce, and share knowledge about the world around us, through communication and interaction. Media are at the centre of how we, as groups and individuals, relate both to society at large - as a structure - and the many social activities that happen within it - as a setting for our lives together. Therefore, there is nothing odd or surprising really about people making sense of their lives, their sociality and their place in history through their relationships with media. Throughout history, different media, such as cave paintings, television, or the internet and mobile phones, have all played a specific role in how we relate to the world, and how we understand how society has transformed, and is continuously transforming. But media don’t just enable us to say, think, and do things. They involve possibilities as well as limitations for how we can act and interact. Digital media is any form of media that uses electronic devices for distribution. This form of media can be created, viewed, modified and distributed via electronic devices. Digital media is commonly used software, video games, videos, websites, social media, and online advertising. Digital media affects the social by playing a large role in processes of mediatisation. Mediatisation describes how media have become an increasingly entangled pan of our realities, a process that is accentuated by digital technology. This is not only in terms of how the mere quantity of media platforms and communication tools have increased. It is just as much about qualitative changes in how media communication is dispersed in new ways - temporally, spatially, and socially in digital society. Technologically mediated communication is now accessible all the time, at any place, so that more and more social settings are affected and shaped by communication through media. Digital society - society as affected by digitally networked communication tools and platforms, such as the internet and social media. Today, we live in a digital society in the sense that we are in an era where our lives, our relationships, our culture, and our sociality are digitised, digitalised, and affected throughout by digital processes. When we speak of today’s society as being digital, we do tend to mean is that it has been transformed in a number of quite drastic ways, following the development of the early ‘computing’ machines into sman devices which have increasingly enabled large-scale networked connections, coordination, and communication in both automated and human-driven ways. The notion of digital society reflects the results of the modern society in adopting and integrating information and communication technologies at home, work, education and recreation. Digital innovations are reshaping our society, economy and industries with a scale and speed like never before.
Social Media and Social Change
There are numerous and varied causes of social change. Four common causes, as recognized by social scientists, are technology, social institutions, population, and the environment. All four of these areas can impact when and how society changes. The key characteristics of social media is that they are based on users having accounts or profiles through which they can 'friend' or follow each other, and that content can be liked/favourited, commented, and shared. Today, social media is best seen as a name for the complex ecosystem of many different social media platforms that serve similar purposes, but in different ways and with different flavours. Each user will use her or his own combination of tools to connect and interact. Some will stick to email and instant messaging, while others will be on sites and apps like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat all at the same time (Lindgren, 2017). Society is not only the sum of what individuals do, but rather something more or larger than that. Something which is super-individual - that exists above and beyond the different individuals that are the building blocks of society. Society has got properties of its own in the shape of collective systems of meaning and communication that we draw upon to function together as an organism. Today, the internet and social media are no doubt part of this super- individual realm (Lindgren, 2017). Technology can create change in the forces social scientists link to social change. Advances in medical technology allow otherwise infertile women to bear children, indirectly leading to an increase in population. Advances in agricultural technology have allowed us to genetically alter and patent food products, changing our environment in innumerable ways. From the way we educate children in the classroom to the way we grow the food we eat, technology has impacted all aspects of modern life.
The Role of Social Media in Social Movement
The role of social media in social movement is to share information and make connections. Social media also helping to attract people and promote the main idea. The major types of social movements are reform movements, revolutionary movements, reactionary movements, self-help movements, and religious movements. Movements happen in our towns, in our nation, and around the world. The true strength of social media is influence. The effect of social media does not stop online. Digitally networked social media - whether they are social network sites, social apps, forums, or blogs - are about sociality. They enable processes of mediation by which individuals become "connected by interaction" to form groups and, by extension, build society (Lindgren, 2017). Social media is effective at bringing awareness to certain issues. Social media became a tool through which people can organise social movements. Social media has two types of influence on social movements. The first is to accelerate recruitment, mobilisation, communication and dissemination of information as well as to expand spaces of mobilisation which were not present in traditional mobilisation techniques. Social movements are also able to use social media as a platform to educate. Technology help social movements. They enables global force and malleability so movements no longer need to be in one location or have one leader for people to unify and advocate for one general idea.
CASE CHAPTER
Example of Social Movement from Estonia
We are looking into social movement from Estonia - World Cleanup Day. The simple idea has grown into a global movement with millions of volunteers and charismatic leaders. The simple act of cleaning has become a force that binds together people and groups that would otherwise never dream of working towards the same goal.
About World Cleanup Day
World Cleanup Day is one of the biggest civic movements of our time, uniting 191 countries across the world for a cleaner planet. A goal that crosses borders and defies religious and cultural differences. This world-changing idea began in the small northern European country of Estonia, in 2008. 50,000 people united to clean up the entire country in just five hours. On that day, a global bottom-up civic movement was born and spread like wildfire around the globe. This captured the imaginations of people worldwide, who were inspired to follow suit with the same ambitious ‘one country, one-day’ formula. Social media platforms which are used: Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. They are for interaction, networking, and creativity. World Cleanup Day 2022 will be held on 17 September.
Statistics
World Cleanup Day on 15 September 2018 united more than 17,6 million people in 157 countries.
World Cleanup Day on 21 September 2019 united more than 21,2 million people in 180 countries.
World Cleanup Day on 19 September 2020 united more than 11 million people in 166 countries.
World Cleanup Day on 19 September 2021 united more than 8,5 million people in 191 countries.
Digital Cleanup Day
One of the projects of World Cleanup Day is Digital Cleanup Day. In the digital world, similar to the environment, there is a huge amount of trash. Unnecessary emails, files, apps, duplicates of photos and videos are all digital waste. This digital trash creates digital pollution that continues to consume energy even when we have forgotten it. Each year the internet and its supporting systems produce 900 million tons of CO2, which’s more than the annual output of the whole Germany.
The growing concern about the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector's energy consumption and CO2 pollution created by wasteful digital practices brought Let’s Do It World to initiate first global digital cleanup campaign in 2020. Digital Cleanup Day is held annually in third Saturday of March.
The result of the Digital Cleanup Day 2022: 2,7 million GB was deleted that resulted in at least 683 tons of CO2 that was prevented.
You can read more about digital waste and the campaign here.
ANALYSING
A Theory of Digital Media and Social Change
Social change refers to transformations of social relations, symbolic meanings, value structures, and other things that make up the social fabric. Such changes can of course come from a number of sources - political, economic, demographic, technological, and so on. Some patterns of change may be cyclic, while others can be more or less one-directional. We are interested here in the type of social change that happens because people use digital technology. When we discuss social change and digital media, we deal with transformations that spring, on the whole, from flows of technology and media - from social actions and practices in the technoscapes and mediascapes. The media that we use will affect what we see, how we speak, and what we do. Digital media can transform social behaviours and relationships completely, but they may also change them just a bit, and sometimes nearly not at all. The effects of digital media on social change are ambiguous and complex. From an empirical and analytical perspective, however, we always have the possibility to look closer at some settings or contexts to assess what types of social change - or what potential for social change - people’s uses of digital media might contribute to in that specific case.
It is important to emphasise that no one person will engage in only one way with digital media. In practice, people will use YouTube, for example, in a number of different ways, sometimes harnessing its socially transformative potential, and sometimes just using it in old media ways. The point is that sometimes, some parts of the social practices of some users align with the notion of the digitally analogue. Just because a tool or platform has transformative potential, it does not mean that all users always leverage that potential in all of their uses. The YouTube example, its uses cease to be just like watching TV the moment that someone posts a comment, registers a like or a dislike, links or embeds the video on the web, makes a playlist, and so on. Furthermore, if a conventionally organised media corporation does not produce the content - as it was in the previous example - the mere emulation of television has also been transcended.
Digital media have changed the fabric of society - happen when social actions and practices that are carried out rely so much on digitally specific affordances that they would not be possible without them.
Consider memes as an example. They are images and text, so there is nothing new there. But the entire social practice around them - the handy image editing, the ‘internet’-humour, and their sometimes-viral spread - could not have happened in, say, 1989. They are a product of digital society, and one - however small piece of the puzzle we must consider when exploring how digital media transforms sociality. We could ask the same of hashtags, likes, blogging, vlogging, fanfiction, hacktivism, and so on. You will realise that all these phenomena have elements of the digitally analogue, enhanced, and transformative, all at the same time. We are in a phase which, digital journalist Adam Tinworth (2012: n.p.) says, marks the transition from the era where we’re excited by the shiny new digital toys that we have, and start to become excited by the changes that these shiny not-so-new toys are making in the way we live.
From the perspective of social change, the strongest impact of digital media might in fact come from its more surprising and seemingly odd uses, and from those things that we have yet to develop concepts for. These are ambiguous activities; the vlogs, hashtags, texts, snaps, selfies, posts, and pins, which would seem to be apolitical, ridiculous, nihilistic, or pointless in our old vocabularies. In fact, the social and cultural challenges and provocations of memes, subversive selfies, cute cats, trolling, and other digitally native and emergent social phenomena may prove in the future to be the most revolutionary contributions of digital media to a transformation of the social.
CONCLUSION
Digital technologies have grown exponentially, and their use has globalized. Ubiquitous and continuous connectivity has reached much of humanity thanks to the mass take-up of smartphones and the consequent access to information, social networks and audiovisual entertainment. The acceleration of technical progress in the digital realm has made the use of devices and applications employing cloud computing, big data analysis, blockchains or artificial intelligence routine.
Technological progress has gone along with socially negative outcomes, such as the exclusion of a large proportion of the world’s people from the benefits of digitalization, essentially because their incomes are too low for them to have meaningful connectivity (i.e., high-quality access), access to devices, fixed home connections and the ability to use these day to day. A large demand gap has thus opened up, as coverage is adequate but is not reflected in connections and usage. Other problems have also worsened, such as the proliferation of fake news and cyber attacks, the growing risk to privacy and personal data security, and the large-scale production of electronic waste.
LITERATURE
Where do ideas come from? 2020, ADG CREATIVE, adgcreative.net
Digital technologies for a new future 2002, ELAC, cepal.org
Digital Cleanup Day, digitalcleanupday.org
What is digital capability?, digitalcapability.jisc.ac.uk
Learn about digital platforms and how they can help you boost your business, hotmart.com
The Role of Technology, knightfoundation.org
Lindgren, Simon 2017, Digital Media and Society, SAGE Publications Ltd
Little, Willian, Introduction to Sociology - 1st Canadian edition, Pressbook
Introduction to Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World, University of Minnesota, Pressbook
Goorha, Prateek & Potts, Jason 2017, Mechanisms of the Theory of Ideas: A New Theory of Ideas
Trott P 2008, Innovation Management and New Product Development, 4th Edition, Prentice Hall
About World Cleanup Day, worldcleanupday.org
YouTube video 'World Cleanup Day 2021'
YouTube video 'Digital Cleanup Day 2022'
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