Creativity on the Internet

Creativity on the Internet · 20 March 2021

(Click the picture to watch my 2018 Trip to the Zoo video.)

The internet can be a great place to show off your creativity. Or lack thereof.

I have been writing and posting on the internet for many years now. Since 2006. (Or probably more accurately since 2007 since I just had a couple pieces in 2006.) Still, it has been a long run of weekly blog posts. Something I never dreamed I would be doing fourteen years later. After all, who dreams of writing in obscurity for fourteen years? Nobody. People dream of writing a bestseller right out of the gate. People dream about being syndicated after a few weeks of starting a blog. Nobody dreams of obscurity. Then again, fame and fortune are not really the points of my writing.

I have often explained that writing is like breathing for me. No writing, no life. Or at least, not as much life. I have also explained that I write because I believe God has called me to write. Even in obscurity. I cannot waste a gift from God. That would be crazy. (Even if people would argue that I have no gift.) But there is another reason that I write.

I write as an outlet for creativity.

Creativity is something that I believe we all have. Some people are more creative than others. Yes, some people are more artistic than others. And artistic seems to be the way we measure creativity. But everybody is creative in some way. We must create. It is written in our DNA. At least that is what I argued in a different post.

Most people are content to keep their creativity to themselves. Or maybe share it with their family and friends. But I am not most people. For some reason, I like to share my creativity (or lack thereof) on the internet.

The interweb is a great place to show off your creativity. Whether you are a blogger or a vlogger or an artist or a musician or a videographer or a teacher or you just like to see your own creations, you can throw your stuff on the internet and see what sticks. Or at least that is what I do. I create stuff and throw it against that proverbial wall that is the internet and see what sticks.

Actually, it all sticks because the internet is forever. (But that is another completely different story.)

I have not become a vlogger. At least not yet, but I do have my own YouTube channel. I started it because I wanted to post lectures for my classes. Sure, I had delusions of grandeur when I started. But I also knew that my lectures were probably not going to get more viewers than just my students. In fact, my hope was that they would watch the videos at home so they could work at school, a concept called flipping the classroom. Instead, they just used the computers in my classroom to watch the videos. Still, those videos proved to be vital to teaching during the pandemic.

I have also used my YouTube channel to show off some of my other creative endeavors.

I love to take pictures. I am not a great photographer, but I like to get out the camera to take candids of people when we all get together. I also enjoy taking pictures of sunsets and landscapes and flowers and all those other things that people think about when they think of photography. And I like putting those pictures together into videos. Slide shows really. I have slide shows of Christmases and trips to the zoo and family reunions. Not all of them are on YouTube, I keep my family off the web when it comes to pictures. At least mostly. But I enjoy making the slideshows of the pictures I have taken on vacations and other outings. It is fun to just put them all together and compose the music and post them on the internet.

(Click the picture to watch my Inktober 2020 video.)

One of the most recent slide shows I released was of my ink drawings from Inktober. It was such fun to make the 31 ink drawings, that I had to do more than just post them on Instgram, I had to put them into a slide show. And I put that slide show on the internet. Naturally.

I know that I am probably destined to live in obscurity as a creative person, but that does not matter. It does not matter whether anybody reads my writing, I will still write. And so it is with my other creative endeavors on the internet. It does not matter whether anybody watches my videos, I will still post them. Because whether or not anybody reads or watches, I still like to be creative. And for some odd reason, I like to post that creativity on the internet for all to see. Or not.

Like I already said, the internet is a great place to show off your creativity. Or lack thereof.

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