What is originality? I began asking myself this rather deep question after reading a survey from the United States claiming that most «original» content – stuff you haven't read or seen before – is developed by traditional media rather than the Internet. In other words, you're more likely to discover something you don't know already in this magazine or in your favourite newspaper. Bloggers, Twitter and the rest often recycle material that's already been published.
But is there any such thing as a pure act of creation? As journalists, we base our articles on interviews with people, spiced with information from reference books and older articles. The creative challenge is to tell the story in an entertaining way. Even people who write fiction base their novels on real people and events, or their own memories. Scratch a science fiction movie and you'll find that it's about a childhood trauma or a news event. Harry Potter and Star Wars, after all, are about growing up. And the more recent Avatar is about colonisation and ecology.
The Internet may not be entirely full of new masterpieces, but it does give us access to knowledge. And those facts might inspire our next burst of creativity. As Einstein said «The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.»
