The advent of the creative age

Man has, in the past, lived through the following broad eras or ages until recently – hunter-gatherer age, agricultural age, and industrial age. While the industrial age started around the 17th century and continues to this day, in the last few decades, we have stepped into the information age. Similar to producers and consumers of agricultural and industrial ages, the information age also has information producers and information consumers. The early part of the information age was dominated by big companies, governments, and other organizations which produced information and disseminated it to their customers, or the general public at large – who consumed it. TV, Radio and Newspapers were popular mechanisms through which information was disseminated to the public. The common man had little or no say in generation or dissemination of information.

However, as we make progress in the information age, a new age is opening up before us – the “Creative Age”. The creative age is different from the information age in that it is enabling a wide cross-section of people across many areas of the world to participate and express themselves in creative ways and means. The creative age is allowing the common man to become an information producer as well as information consumer using the Internet and by making use of simple technology tools. Unlike in the past, the information flow has also accelerated since the power to create and consume information now lies with the common man.

The creative age has mainly been accelerated by rapid globalization and the spread of the Internet – enabling easy access to information and knowledge by large swathes of population across the globe.

The number of people who have affordable access to creative means and tools is at an all-time high today. The world has never had this many people, nor as many with the time, tools, and education to produce information & marketable work, and an equally large number of people able to consume the information – as we are experiencing today. The boundaries between producer and consumer are getting blurred. We now have a “prosumer” who is both a producer as well as a consumer of information.

We live in an age where an individual, with nothing more than a smartphone and a mobile connection, anywhere on this planet, can create books, movies or music that can go out into the world and touch millions and millions of people.

The rise of user-friendly creative platforms and “mashability” has allowed artists to use multiple media to create works of stunning originality, often with minimal technical skillset.

The explosion of online platforms and forums where creative work can be digitally disseminated is also at an unprecedented peak (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.). This allows men and women of all stripes, young and old to have a truly global reach, regardless of their location.

For example, today, people are able to generate their own personal news / digital content and publish the same on online media sharing sites such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter and others instantly. Similarly, anyone with a camera and a video-editing tool can create their own video and publish it on Youtube, where millions of others can watch it and also provide their feedback.

Never before in the history of mankind has the potential of every human on the face of the earth been so vast.

In the same vein, many of those platforms allow for the best overall works to be easily curated for viral exposure. This means the average quality of what we consume is generally extremely high.

Historically, novice artists had limited means of securing the training that they needed to perfect their art. Only the best of the luckiest could get a patron and/or apprenticeship. Today, the best practices of those former masters are readily available in well-collated form online.

The creative age, which started a decade or so earlier (early 2000’s) is still in its nascent stage. In its initial wave, it has successfully enabled digital content in textual, image and video formats to be created and shared between people. It has also brought in e-commerce platforms and enabled online businesses, where anyone can be a buyer or a seller of goods and services.

The next wave in creative age will make use of machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, internet-of-things, analytics, blockchain and possibly radically new technologies to power people’s creative abilities further, and take the creative age to a whole new level. The world will be further flattened out and people will gain greater power to express themselves creatively. The world’s economy will be also be increasingly powered by creative products and services developed by the common man.