The Question of What You Need to Know to Write Your Paper

Here are a couple of examples:

For the groups doing film adaptations of classic literature, and particularly for the folks interested in marketing and/or entertainment writing, here's a piece in The New York Times about a social networking marketer called Oliver Luckett (in the middle at left) and his new company theAudience (no space) that builds online fan bases.  The descriptions of (1) the state of the film industry and (2) the business interest behind it don't appear until paragraphs 9 and 10. They are interesting for both content and also for the fact that the author buried them later on, once the celebrity story about the celebrity marketer has gotten off the ground.

And here's a piece from the summer about a guy in Oklahoma who pumps out "reviews" of books on sites like Amazon.  Same idea.  Both of these are in the category of "need to know about shift to social networking to write about contemporary culture industries."

David and Adam are working on non-commercial or bottom-up-commercial alternatives to the current music industry. There are some comments about this in the piece about theAudience.  The issue also comes up around college textbooks.  See this blog post by a prominent blogger on "open source" issues for a good overview of types of non-commercial licensing, and some comments about "predation" vs. "production" models of creative output in the current economy.

First Meeting: Literature and the Innovation Crisis

As you know from the Course Description, the primal goal prompting the course was to organize, formulate, and develop the ideas present in academic literary and cultural study (LCS) about creativity and innovation. This task operates within some initial parameters.

• Other people's fields (OPFs) dominate public discussion of innovation: economics, management, and intellectual property law are three main examples.  "Innovation economics" sees one of our authors, Joseph A. Schumpter, as a founding thinker.  This is innovation as money.
• OPFs dominate public discussion of creativity as a group, social, public, or organizational phenomenon. Examples include cognitive science, behavioral economics, organizational behavior, and just about everything written about what we used to call the New Economy.   In class I'll do show-and-tell with some examples.
• Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
• Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn
• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational 
• Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

• Then there is the Social Network, a zeitgeist more than a theory or phenomenon that fuses creativity and innovation with technology, the Internet, information theory, telecommunications, Wired-Boing Boing production frames, and the flows and fractures of contemporary post-globalized society -- ongoing racism, resegregation, "continuous partial attention" in relation to other people's cultures--into a vision of how we live now.  Since society as an IT-mediated network is a kind of theory of everything, it functions as a contemporary form of Deism, a totalizing explanation of the social creation.

This raises the questions of Theory, Voice, and Divergence

• Has our home turf theorized creativity and/or innovation in or across its abundant theory-narratives? Can we gather these without  lot of trouble?
• Can we project and disseminate LCS narratives of creativity and innovation?
• Do LCS perspectives diverge from familiar, public narratives of creativity and innovation? 

Likely answers: yes, no, yes, and yes.  The no is why we need at least one course for this.

For Tuesday, I will bring a draft syllabus for us to finalize together, a list of the course's Three Premises, and some materials to discuss.

On your side, please be prepared to identify and discuss two things:

1. your own main academic project while in graduate school (need not be related to the course)
2. an author or text that you particularly like that does seem relevant to our course.

Feel free to be in touch in the meantime.