The Wall Around the Creativity Industry Is Crumbling

Last week my friend Kathleen, a fellow Yahoo alum, and I were brainstorming about ways her company, OneTrueMedia, could align products with businesses’ need to tell their stories online in text, photos, audio, and video. The idea was to empower businesses to create their own media; professional intermediaries such as video producers are no longer required. It was the latest in a series of unrelated events that have heightened my recognition of how quickly the walls that once surrounded the creativity industry are crumbling.

I’m working with another friend, Roy, to produce a book of photographs of the traditional Chinese tea houses he owns in the San Francisco area. In this case he’s planning to forego a publishing house and print the book at his own expense in Hong Kong. Distribution will be through his retail and web sites. Then a couple of days ago, a magazine publisher in the Philippines—someone I didn’t know--emailed to ask if he could use a photo I posted on Flickr from my vacation in Beijing, to illustrate an article in an upcoming issue. Not so long ago he would have had to find a stock photo or use a photo bureau. Today a quick Flickr search serves up millions of pictures by photographers from around the world.

Creativity is one of the most basic human urges. For a long time, prosperous businesses have survived as gatekeepers to the process of expressing creativity, producing it, and bringing it to market. Now the gates are being thrown wide open. Low-cost or free services available online offer production, distribution, marketing, and more. Each of us can be—and many of us already are—our own publishers.

At least for the moment, the urgency and novelty of being empowered to do something once reserved for a select elite—present our creative efforts to the masses—is making for lots of online business opportunities. I believe the ongoing democratization of creativity, and applying successful online storytelling tools and techniques from the consumer sector to B2B, is one of the important online trends of 2008.

It’s interesting to ruminate on what this trend will mean culturally, down the road. What we take for granted today as our culture’s storytelling, or art, is inevitably shaped by the gatekeeper structure that has enclosed it. Like a gated garden, it’s been rather tidy and predictable. That’s going to change when the gates come down. No doubt many will bemoan the lack of hierarchy, structure, and uniformity of the old days. They’ll probably regret the “lack of standards” when any Iowa housewife can publish a novel, or New Jersey dentist can make a feature film. I think our language itself, in both the spoken and written forms, is due to evolve.

Yet, on the flip side the tremendous voice that’s unleashed is sure to be vibrant. Audiences will be free to affiliate with the content that resonates most directly, without relying on gatekeepers to make preliminary judgments that may or may not reflect the market’s real tastes--and who also have been collecting a generous helping of revenue in exchange for their custodial role. Exciting times are ahead, with even greater need for configurable search capabilities, community input, and navigation features to help consumers make sense of it all. In other words, a new round of online business opportunities.