Margaret Atwood On How Tech Influences Creativity

within the latest idea-scary, dystopian parable from stated words-genius, Margaret Atwood, society is experimenting with turning into a prison. your entire inhabitants of the unsettling group of Positron, as depicted in the center Goes final, spends half the time as prisoners and half of the time as guards. It does no longer go great. taking into account that the story also includes intercourse-robots and different misfit gadgetry, the principal premise serves as an apt metaphor for our on occasion adversarial relationship with technology. mostly, it appears as if we are the ones in cost, but sometimes it seems like the opposite direction around. Are we influencing expertise or is know-how influencing us?

clearly, the answer is: both. We’re like chefs who need ever extra meals to maintain ourselves whereas making more and more complicated meals for others. One element of this symbiotic relationship Margaret Atwood is principally fascinated by, although, is the impression new know-how has on creativity. The paradigm-transferring author does not only write about the future, she has additionally helped bring about adjustments to how we write in the long run. as the creator of the LongPen, she’s made it so that authors can sign books from great distances; and as the first contributor to the longer term Library challenge, she’s turn into a pioneer of writing novels meant strictly for later generations to read. A master at building future worlds in fiction, Atwood can also be doing so in fact.

it is easy to handiest wager which creative strategies storytellers in one hundred years will utilize. simply taking a look around, however, one can take a look at the way in which we manner works of art now evolving prior to our eyes. With the guts Goes remaining new in retailers, the writer/poet/hero spoke to Co.Create about how the medium shapes the message, the misplaced art of center of attention, and whether any individual need even hassle looking to optimize creativeness.

know-how Influences, however doesn’t Dictate, the way you keep in touch

Margaret Atwood is known as an early adopter. alternatively, that doesn’t mean she automatically makes use of any new technology that comes down the pike. Being a selective early adopter approach communicating with the tools one feels happy with, and fending off others.

“I don’t belief the cloud,” she says. “every person knows that Moscow has long gone back over to typewriters. anything else on the web probably leaks like a sieve. So we’re currently exchanging scripts by using FedEx as a result of we do not need them to be leaked. anything you absolutely don’t want to be leaked, until you had been a master of hackery and cover, you will have to transfer and store another approach, particularly considering the fact that Mr. Snowden and what we know. We more or less suspected it ahead of but we didn’t realize it was once relatively so intensive.”

The Medium Shapes The Story You’re Telling

while you do use the most recent social media or video distribution platform, it is going to affect what you create.

“Any new technology or platform or medium goes to steer to a definite extent the form of what gets put available in the market,” Atwood says. “on the other hand, human storytelling is very, very outdated. To a undeniable extent, technology shapes the bite-dimension of how you might be sending it into the sector. as an example, people put writing on their telephone briefly chapters. So Proust shouldn’t have achieved well with that. We enhance brief varieties as a result of we’re limited in characters however we did that with the telegram. ‘6:15 Paddington, deliver gun, Sherlock Holmes.’ Or better, ‘Holmes,’ in reality.”

know-how Influences The Substance of reports

each new risk creators can use to make stories, the characters within those stories can also use them for different ends.

“every time there’s a new piece of tech, it influences what you can put in a plot,” Atwood says. “so as quickly as cell phones appeared you couldn’t have certain communication problems anymore. You couldn’t have that scene, you had to consider a technique of managing the person’s cellphone going missing or being tossed into a bush or, in The woman With The Dragon Tattoo, it’s important to grind up the sim card and stomp it underfoot. it is getting more difficult and harder to perform and not using a mobile phone, with out all these totally different cards and passwords that we have. And writers are turning that to interesting account, for example the fact that some people exist beneath the radar and so they should not have a digital footprint and that makes them really beautiful invisible.”

that you may’t Optimize creativeness

some of the main purposes of technology is to beef up even areas we by no means knew wanted improving. everything must be greater, more highly effective, and sooner. however no longer everything may also be superior that means, though.

“I don’t think the creativeness is topic to effectivity,” Atwood says. “If the rest, daydreaming is very helpful for it. in truth, daydreaming is very helpful for any more or less productivity because it creates a blank space and permits the thoughts to return into that. So what people seem to need most preparation about in the space of creativity just isn’t ‘optimizing’ their imaginations—it is their self belief. and that’s the reason as a result of we now have been brainwashed into thinking that we’re all experts of some form, and you could’t in point of fact be a author unless you may have received something like a master’s level. obviously, we want dentists to be educated, however writing is human storytelling and every person does it.

“So the problems in creativity aren’t how do we get humans to be extra creative—individuals are more creative. it is how inventive folks can actually make a dwelling doing what they do in an financial system akin to ours that values money notably else. what’s the price, the money price, of John Keats’s ‘Ode To A Nightingale,’ apart from the manuscript, simply the poem itself, what’s its price? There is not one. as a result of it’s no longer in that economic system.”

The importance of center of attention In a Distracting World

Coding appears to be the way in which of the long run, and kids are studying to do so at an early age. however coding requires nice center of attention, the challenges of which have transform more difficult than ever.

“Oddly enough, teenage readers desire paper books—except for for the more or less studying they do on the iPad, which is interactive. I do not know in regards to the toddlers, although, they appear to like each,” Atwood says. “there’s something about the tactility, there’s something concerning the eye/hand/brain coordination that is very grounding. And there’s something about the instantaneous nature of issues on drugs that may be very speedifying and can also be beautiful distracting. i believe one of the crucial issues that youngsters are gonna must do is discover ways to focal point. Adults wish to learn how to do this too. however any new technology quote “freaks folks out.” The radio did that too as soon as. supply folks enough time and they will regulate.”