P2P sharing

As I look back on every new technology or idea that I have experienced in my generation thus far, I think, by far, one of the most creative ideas is peer-to-peer sharing.  First there was Napster, I had to be about 7 or 8 years old.  The basic principle is simple: everyone owns a little bit of music or video or program and uploads it to a main database.  Once the files are in the database, anyone can access them and download them to their computer.  This eliminates a lot of trouble for music fanatics and also television fanatics.  If you like any form of media, peer-to-peer sharing makes getting access to the media extremely easy.  You can find almost anything in these databases, from the most indie unheard-of music to computer games and home-made videos.  When I first heard of the program, I thought it was too good to be true.  Some methods of peer-to-peer sharing are obviously illegal, but I still think the idea is ingenious.  The person who came up with it didn't have to make any music or videos or games, but had an idea of how to make them easily accessible.  Since this is novel and appropriate for our time and age, the book would define peer-to-peer sharing as creative.  I think it is creative not only because it is novel and extremely appropriate, but because it is used by millions of people in our nation.  Just like Smash Brothers, the idea has been accepted as creative by our society, so it has stayed around for a very long time.  I know I use it simply so I can organize all of my music by albums because I love to listen to full albums and very rarely just a single song.  When I pull up my menu on my iPod when I drive, I always organize by album so I can listen to the "album experience."  This is made possible by the programs I use to share and organize my music.  Even the music I buy off of iTunes, which is about 90% of my music, I transfer and organize in different programs before I sync them to my iPod.  The creativity in peer-to-peer sharing is more of a conceptual idea than an actual product like music or art.

Super Smash Brothers...

I think that the Nintendo 64 game, Super Smash Brothers, is very creative.  The game is simple.  All of your favorite characters from different hit games during the 90's are thrown into one game.  And what do they do?  What everyone wants to do: All out brawl.  They fight to knock each other off the course.  I hadn't played the game since I was about 10 years old, until I got to Millsaps.  It is a game that is sweeping the campus... everybody plays!  The reason it is so creative is because although these characters were previously created, the makers of the game collaborated in order to take each character and let them do what everyone wishes they could do in the individual games, free-for-all fight!  I know they still make money off of this game because I bought it just recently.  The game must be creative if people 10-15 years later still buy and trade it, especially with our astonishing rate of technological advances.  The book, in Chapter 7, talks about sociology, which is the study of how groups work together.  It has been verified through study that creative people who work together and combine their ideas come up with much more creative ideas.  Creativity is measured by how much the public, or domain of people, think it is creative, as the book also states.  If many people agree that an idea is creative, then it usually stays around for a while.  This was proven with Super Smash Brothers.