The internet is a large open source network that has broken a myriad of barriers, it provided a common place for everyone to have access to knowledge, to be connected, to the collective consciousness of humanity. A gift from us to us, the story of our current era ‘the internet age’ they call it is sort of like the movie ‘World War Z’, where we are the zombies ravaging and losing our minds like savages. It’s an open field of chaos, beauty, construction/destruction, activity, connectivity, social/political correctness. It’s an epoch that’s influencing every one of us in different ways, ways that could profit nations trapped in an endless cycle of poverty and lack of access. There are a plethora of mediums for third world countries to learn and participate in, Darwinism personified [or digitalized], it’s all those zombies running up on each other trying to get over the wall, to be in the wilderness with the rest of the world and you can be certain Africans are eager to catch up on their stride.
The Internet has brought forward creatives in the New Age; an aspect of Africa that’s never been seen as a thing of value, it’s something that can bring economic & social streams of income & information and to the nation, yet has long been ignored. but the internet came along and showed us a world that put the creatives we ignore as one of its pillars. It created a space for evolution of the African creative mind and kept evolving as the levels of internet usage peaked, along recent years we’ve become more equipped and sophisticated in our ways, confident in our expression.
Locally and globally, the splurge of accessible information has given every single person the world, literally at their fingertips, extended possibilities of practicable mediums, your skill sets can adapt to the different variations and forms you converse with digitally every day. With an iPhone one can be a photographer, uploading content to Instagram; make beats and get listeners on a SoundCloud page, a youtube audience ready to watch the weird Vlog you just made about eating noodles. The internet + technology has defeated the limitations that kept creatives trapped in one box, and it’s both a blessing and a curse.
With over 7.6 billion people in the world and half of them having access to the internet, it’s chaotic to know who’s who when everyone can be anyone and do anything that allows them to express themselves online, we sometimes forget who’s true and who actually has the gift and discipline to express in multiple ways but it also allows more ideas to circulate and mix with different mediums creating a limitless pool of multiple chain reactions that can affect us in negative and positive ways.
Multidimensional creatives are obviously going to dominate the future since they can do what a bunch of people can do collapsed into one person. They allow room for one person’s mind to create around an idea and creatively direct it on its own, this can also be a major negative as one person can’t work alone but it’s still something intriguing that’s gonna be a large accessory to everyone as time moves on.
