One of the greatest things about e-culture is creativity. The web allows you to have hundreds, if not millions of platforms just waiting for you to display your artworks, your videos, your writings, etc.

But is it just about that? Is there more to the web than being a mere platform, a technical device enabling people to share content?

It seems to me that inspiration and the urge of discovering new things and point of views, are at the core e-culture. For instance, Howard Rheingold, a thinker and an eminent blogger, talks about digital natives (e.g. “for whom laptops and wireless Internet connections are part of the environment, like electricity and running water”, my generation and those born in the 90s’) and explains that:

“[...] it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production”

There you go. My main point here is that people creating online content, create unique, brand new, hybrid, re-interpreted content. These days, as tensions rise between corporations and online “consumers”, who no longer wish to pay those corporations for cultural contents (possibly because they no longer have the legitimacy and control they used to have over these contents), it might be a good idea to underline the fact that the Internet does not simply phagocyte other media in terms of contents. True, when I watch TV online, I’m consuming a content that wasn’t destined for the web but for television. However, what we don’t see is that the Internet can mix up things a bit, and allows people to create brand new contents. That’s how you can end up creating your own music, by making music mash-ups (mixing several songs and creating a new song), Original Soundtracks of your own (like a fanmix, which is “A fan made collection of songs, or an album reflecting on a tv show, movie, character etc” – Urban Dictionary) with your own cover art, or use in a new way pictures related to your favourite movies, tv shows, hobbies made especially made to be used online and reflect your personnality. For instance, you can make icons just like it is done on many online communities on Live Journal; those can be then used for MSN, or simply shared as fully-fledged artistic works.

Therefore, the Internet has its own contents created and consumed by its users eventhough one can argue the basic material may come from traditional media. Finally, one last quote to show how crucial creativity is to e-culture:

“Convergence [we can talk about e-culture as being the culture of convergence today with the web 2.0] does not occur through media appliances, however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.”

(Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, When Old and New Media Collide)

The bottom line is: e-culture is all about making it your own. Your own vision, your own creation, your point of view and pass it on.

A fanmade trailer for the film, “Batman: The Dark Knight”.

In an upcoming post, I’ll write about how e-culture both drives us to be more original and stresses the importance of individuality, while strongly relying on communities and dialogue.