Think Creative

Teaching Visual Communication yesterday and was embroiled in a discussion about culture. Basically what defines culture. Some days back I was also watching an interesting TED talk by Larry Lessig. You can see it  here ! So, both of these ingredients combined by the fact I was trying to teach the students a theory of " the medium is the message " from McLuhan's book "Understanding Media" made everything come together. What I believe the students were finding difficult to understand or conceive is the fact that in some arguments there has to be some evaluation to a metaphysical state rather than a rational real world state. By this, and as trying to be taught yesterday, was the notion of containers. These were described by McLuhan as objects that hold values in the form of a message. This message is released or broadcast and creates an effect. McLuhan nicely uses the lightbulb as a good example. Stating that the mere presence of a lightbulb creates the messag...

This is a double edged sword when the debate about the effectiveness of the internet comes into the arena. How does a creative person sell their wares, or even advertise their wares, without the fear of being copied, ripped off, or having work stolen and reuse. Well, it is an increasing trend in today's creative society to copy/paste concepts and ideas from the more talented and claim them as one's own. Look at the recent news of the Microsoft equivalent to the iPad, due in 2011. It is a simple reflection of the fact they replicated the iPod into a Zune, and replicated many feature from the OS X system interface into the Vista interface. This is just one example of high end reworking of the twists around copyright and patent laws. On a smaller level, and more creative level, how can one defend against someone stealing ideas. An interesting site to look at is this one;  plagiarism.org/ . They state that the terms copying is a weakened description of the more serious aspec...