Creativity

New media nurtures creativity in various and endless ways because it enables the DIY attitude to flourish.The internet is making boundless information on any given topic available to any person with access, and therefore all that is needed to gain the knowledge necessary for new interesting ideas is the power of will, and a limited amount of talent. In the field of digital music, for example, a lot of vocal and instrumental samples that may be used for mixing appear on the internet, leaked by people who work in the recording studio or even by the artist herself, free and ready to use by anyone. In addition, easy-to-use software enable one to create or mash audio tracks. Acid Pro for example, is a software that enables mashups by putting loops of different songs both in time and in tune with each other. Other benefits of digital technology include the fact that you don't need a distributor, because, to quote Mark Vidler from the article The New Math of Mashups, known professionally as Go Home Productions, “your distribution is the Internet, and you don’t need a record label, because it’s your bedroom, and you don’t need a recording studio, because that’s your computer. You do it all yourself.”

Users of new media can also use their power of innovation to come up with ideas which would make social networking sites easier and more interesting to use, etc. An example would be Chris Messina, an early Twitter user, who came up with the idea, inspired by a convention used on other Web sites, to mark conversations about a certain topic with the # symbol. This way, many conferences, for example, can announce the so-called hash tag at the start of the event so attendees can mark all their posts the same way and people can search Twitter for everything written on the conference.