DISABILITY OF CREATIVITY

BY YONI CORCOS

“Though these teachers celebrated the broad range of creative opportunities now open to today’s youth (which we discuss in greater detail below), several arts educators observed that today’s students have more difficulty in coming up with their own idea; they’re far more comfortable engaging with existing ones”.

In contemporary society, technology and internet are used more frequently than anything else in this world. As assumed by many, this could generate positive and also negative influences on the world. Many people are focused on the prompt mobility and accessibility of the internet, and the “tap away” from all the information in the world. However, in Katie Davis’ “The App Generation” she depicts some intriguing faults in regards to how the internet has influenced the debilitation in the youthful minds of society.

Katie Davis, one of the most exemplary authors introducing the influences of the internet, proclaims that many teachers are noticing the fact that their students are exhibiting less creativity than the students of the past generations. According to one of her excerpts, kids who are more dependent on the internet are less interested in creating or developing ideas of their own, however, they promptly exhibit signs of transforming ideas based off ideas previously developed by other people. It seems, according to these very teachers, that these kids sort of “revise” and “edit” these past ideas, making evocations that society sees as renovations that cause progression.

In this website, Valerie Strauss promotes the following quote, “Play is a remarkably creative process that fosters emotional health, imagination, original thinking, problem solving, critical thinking, and self-regulation. As children actively invent their own scenarios in play, they work their way through the challenges life presents and gain confidence and a sense of mastery”.

Strauss argues that kids are more and more creative as they continue to invent scenarios in their heads and preserve the craft of imagination, original thinking, problem solving, and even critical thinking. These mental processes are necessary according to Strauss, for children to preserve their metal creativity, therefore without the strength of such factors we see a rapid decline in creativity among children.

This ties in with what Katie Davis argues in that, kids now, because of the internet, are exposing the faults of the internet and how it is influencing the decline in their creativity. This epidemic makes me question, how society will continue to progress if many of the newest ideas are small incremental add ons to previously developed ones. This is a very scary thought that suggests that the now creatively stunted kids will not be able to provide any new innovations and thus will not abet in the development of society.