Andrew David Baron is an independent Social Media Strategist in NYC. You can tweet to him @AndrewDavdBaron.
.
.
Social Media has rapidly become one of the main ways we communicate to each other, replacing to a certain extent talking, seeing and experiencing each other in real life. This imbues both positive and negative aspects to our society, culture and the way we think of ourselves as individuals. I’ve heard plenty about the negative on various articles here and there over the years, but what about the positive?
I’d like to discuss a truly positive thing that is developing right now as we speak, as you read this article, which is crowdsourced art.
When you think of the word crowdsourced, you might immediately think of a social ervice like, Foursquare, Yelp or any number of other sites that rely on userdata to make their network work more functional and efficient, right? Well that’s not the only type of crowdsourcing out there. In October 2012, I thought long and hard about social media, crowdsourcing and thought how could I combine those concepts with my own personal art to come up with something completely unique and new. Turns out there was something out there that fit the bill perfectly – Google Drive.
If you’re not familiar with Google Drive, it’s part of Google’s suite of apps available for Gmail users. This particular app allows users to create sharable documents in the style of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others. Using Google Drive, I create a Word type of document that is completely and 100 percent open to the public to enter, read, add, and/or edit. The concept was simple, to complete a full book (with a cover, chapter, annotations, table of contents, etc.) within a year’s time using only crowdsourced participation. As far as I am aware this is a first of it’s kind on the web. This is a link to the page to see for yourself (feel free to do whatever you want in the document).
What makes this unique and interesting is seeing how complete strangers interact with each other’s ideas, words, phrases and concepts in this document. The possibilities are endless with this type of formula of a concept. Imagine if say, I opened another document and invited a bunch of screenwriters using Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr, etc. and asked them to invite other screenwriters, who in turn would invite other screenwriters to a document to all collaborate on the world’s first movie treatment to be made in a Google document.
Social media really has blown open the doors of human possibility to create amazingly new types of art. We, as artists, as humans, are no longer limited to the historical tools and mediums of art, such as the paintbrush, paper, paint, clay, marble, easels, potter’s wheel, etc. The future is now and humanity stands to benefit immensely because of these new explorations of potential.
What would you create using social media to make art? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
Photo Credit: Flickr user mkhmarketing
