What is Creativity If Not Seeing Common Things in Uncommon Ways?

Source: http://bsmartallieeliza.com/

Hey, I can't guarantee that these notes will be entirely original. I jotted them down back in February of 2013. It is now the summer of 2015. I was taking a Coursera MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) at the time, which required that I review a whole lot of online material. Some of what follows may be original -- some of it may not be. Looking over my notes years later I found these bits on creativity interesting, that's why I'm posting them:

I recognize many of these notes as having come from Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing

Technology is changing the rules of the game in every aspect of our lives.

Genius is mastery of content and its dissemination.

To create is merely to choose wisely from the existing pool of content. What becomes important is what the author (composer, artist) decides to choose, Success lies in knowing what to include and --more importantly, what to leave out.

Suppression of self-expression is impossible. The act of choosing and re-framing occurs even when you are copying.

You are a mash-up of what you let into your life.

Creativity is the art of re-purposing, choosing and re-framing.

It really isn't plagiarism if you study instead of skim, steal from many sources instead of stealing from just one, credit sources you steal from, transform the content you are working with, and remix the whole thing rather than to simply rip it off.

The thing that distinguishes my work from yours is how I make my way through the thicket of information, how I manage it, how I parse it and how I organize and distribute it.

There is no harm in appropriation of content, so long as you acknowledge the source and transform the content in significant ways.

You ask if we are witnessing the destruction of authorship, but what is "authorship" and originality in the digital age anyway?

In the digital age words and images are interchangeable.

What you need to know about texts

I recognize the bulk of what follows as coming from my notes on Pierre Bayard's How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read

Culture is really a matter of orientation. Culture is not a matter of having read certain texts, but of being able to find your bearings within texts as a system. It is to understand the relationship between one text and another. It is to grasp texts as a body of work. You have to know that texts form a system and you have to be able to locate each element in relation to the others. The interior of a text is less important than its exterior -- what counts in a text are the texts along side of it. The text is less of a text than it is the whole discussion about it. We must pay attention to that discussion in order to talk about a text.

A text is re-invented with every reading.