Category: ideas

Daniel Pink believes our social order is about to flip – creative people will have a big advantage over traditional logical thinkers. “In the world envisioned in his recent book, ‘A Whole New Mind,’ the competitive edge will belong not to the linear, logical, analytical ‘left-brain’ lawyers and accountants and computer programmers who have long held sway but to the creative, empathic, ‘right-brain’ artists and caregivers who have traditionally enjoyed less social status, or at least smaller paychecks. It may seem hard to believe, since we are all up to our screen-reddened eyeballs in an Information Age that seems to be all about left-brain dominance, but Pink insists that a ”Conceptual Age” is upon us.

“Once, a museum, a Hollywood studio, a book publisher or an orchestra shaped public conversation about the arts. Today, they respond. Where once there was tastemaking by decree, now there are trends arrived at by consensus. As ’50s bohemia morphed into ’60s counterculture and then into the rapid absorption by the mainstream of every hot fringe trend, the public challenged the establishment’s role in defining quality. In the age of podcasting, peer-to-peer file-sharing and pocket camcorders, everybody’s a curator, a critic and a producer, all at the same time.”

Certain kinds of memory decrease the more knowledge you accumulate, reports a new study. “Verbatim memory is often a property of being a novice. As people become smarter, they start to put things into categories, and one of the costs they pay is lower memory accuracy for individual differences. The ability to categorize is often very helpful, but this study shows how it can lead people to ignore individual details.”

Have we begun expecting too much of art and music? These days, as an on-demand world drives us to demand ever more instant gratification, fewer and fewer people seem to have time for anything that cannot be appreciated in an instant. Worse, we’ve trapped ourselves in a mindset that says that the arts exist to bolster our cities and make our children smarter, and nothing that doesn’t quickly accomplish those goals is worth having. “It’s hard to argue for art on its purest grounds, because describing what makes art so powerful is hard to put into words… Often, the thing that makes a piece of art so important to you means nothing to the next guy.”

Let’s be blunt. Fox’s runaway smash hit, American Idol, is a worthless piece of television dreck featuring horrible singing, vacuous songs, and predictable fake snarkiness from three judges so caught up in their own brilliance that they seem to have forgotten that the show is supposed to be about music. But still, Idol has become a huge part of America’s pop culture, and Dominic Papatola says that the arts world ought to be taking notice. “I’m willing to bet that the main reason for the runaway success of American Idol” lies in its cunning ability to link the worlds of art and competition.” Americans love a winner, and they love watching the loser squirm even more, and the arts could use an injection of that type of (admittedly manufactured) excitement if it ever again wants to compete for large-scale attention.

Richard Florida became a superstar in the world of urban planning and the arts a few years back when he wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, which claimed that creative types, artists, and free thinkers, were the essential component of a successful and thriving metropolis. But several urban planning experts have since questioned the validity of Florida’s thesis, calling it overly simplistic and a naked appeal to the type of people who could (and did) make Florida and his theory famous. Still, there’s no question that creativity and arts do offer at least some benefit to cities, so the question now seems to be, “What are the benefits the creative sector can deliver for cities, and what are the pitfalls of catering to it?”

With students now able to instantaneously check on the internet what teachers teach in their classes, the dynamics of the classroom are changing. “The immediate availability of vast amounts of information, and the ability to make perfect infinite copies, to communicate, and to distribute instantaneously will, by necessity, alter the ways we learn and teach. Transparency holds out the promise of a deeper, richer and more democratic educational experience, but also an implied challenge to the traditional academic order.”

Tecahers are finding that devices that instantly register student answers to questions in class, change the dynamics of a class. “The devices, which the students call “clickers,” are being used on hundreds of college campuses and are even finding their way into grade schools. They alter classroom dynamics, engaging students in large, impersonal lecture halls with the power of mass feedback. Clickers ease fears of giving a wrong answer in front of peers, or of expressing unpopular opinions.”

A new study suggests that we may be able to use language better irf we move our hands. “The very fact of moving your hands around helps you recall parts of the story–the gestures help you access memory and language so that you can tell more of the story.”

“If there can be said to be a theme running throughout the history of American art, music, and literature, it might well be the allure, the danger, and the quiet beauty of the wilderness. “Scads of crucial American stories and images feast on the idea of wilderness, of a place apart from the so-called civilized world, of a pristine region that can rejuvenate a jaded soul.” So it’s little wonder that, when wilderness and the environment become political issues, there are considerable artistic and literary overtones to the debate.