I saw this video detailing Jonathan Coulton a couple of weeks back on the N.Y. Times and just had a chance to read through the related article. I like the way the piece illustrates media transformations through examples of viral musicianship and alternative modes of interacting. The combination of DIY recording, Internet distribution, and second Web social promotion has clearly had an impact on the way music gets made and shared. I like the way the Times puts it, “This confluence of forces has produced a curious inflection point: for rock musicians, being a bit of a nerd now helps you become successful.” Coulton’s “Codemonkey” is a perfect example. The number of YouTube entries for the song is impressive and you can hear how the song itself resonates with lots of inner geeks.

Beyond making me want to cheer for Coulton and his online crew of viral fans, the article makes me think about the way these transformations might also play out in other contexts. A big concern pointed out in the piece is the breakdown of public and private lives wrought by extending the artist into the social Petri dish of the Web: “In many ways, the Internet’s biggest impact on artists is emotional. When you have thousands of fans interacting with you electronically, it can feel as if you’re on stage 24 hours a day.”

Clearly the level of public transformation is not as extensive, but similar concerns can be raised about all kinds of activities as they move toward the 24/7 mediation of the Web. I’m thinking of even the added exposure that teachers or students experience as they become posters, bloggers, participants in online culture. Really we’re looking at new kinds of rhetorical situations in which boundaries must be constantly broken down and re-established. Relating the experiences of Tad Kubler, guitarist for Hold Steady, the piece points out that “Kubler has cultivated a skill that is unique to the age of Internet fandom, and perhaps increasingly necessary to it, as well: a nuanced ability to seem authentic and confessional without spilling over into a Britney Spears level of information overload.”

None of this is that surprising, but it is interesting to see the kinds of decisions artists now make about how they compose their public persona. But there’s one more layer to the piece that complicates things even further. It’s not just that these new modes of being public have created a kind of supercharger for voyeurism that complicates artist’s lives. The environment actually pushes back in a way that alters the basic paradigms of art and creativity.

For many of these ultraconnected artists, it seems the nature of creativity itself is changing. It is no longer a solitary act: their audiences are peering over their shoulders as they work, offering pointed comments and suggestions. When OK Go released its treadmill-dancing video on YouTube, it quickly amassed 15 million views, a number so big that it is, as Kulash, the singer, told me, slightly surreal. “Fifteen million people is more than you can see,” he said. “It’s like this big mass of ants, and you’re sitting at home in your underpants to see how many times you’ve been downloaded, and you can sort of feel the ebb and flow of mass attention.”

Again, some of this is evolutionary change—it's not that different from anticipating and adjusting compositions for either an addressed or evoked audience. But some of it does represent a shift. The artist is no longer working in supposed isolation; now literally bombarded by feedback mechanisms, the artist and the composition are shaped more forcefully than ever by listeners and viewers.

But there is an even bigger shift. Much of the creative production for the larger phenomenon of artistic projects is now off loaded to the crowd. The online crew churning out Codemonkey videos, remixing and amplifying the work of artists like Coulton represents a serious shift in how creativity happens. At this point, I doubt that those who study composition have begun to consider all of the implications for such social creativity. I wonder if these developments can be used to leapfrog some of the hangups in place already when it comes to formalized writing instruction and creativity. Compositionists are quite keen on the social. Perhaps that fancy for the social can be used to smuggle the creative back into writing classrooms.

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