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“Just as smartphones revolutionized how we avoid talking to each other and food trucks changed our tolerance for eating while standing on the street, the emergence of data science as a vehicle for expression is going to radically change how we create.” – Baratunde Thurston – author of The New York Times best seller How to Be Black and the founder of Cultivated Wit, a comedy and technology company that tells stories in engaging ways.
This quote is borrowed from Baratunde’s post on Fast Company: “Meaning In Numbers: Data Is The New Common Language,” and it got me thinking. If data is the new vehicle for expression and creativity, what role does data storage play? First, we have to understand where creativity and expression comes from. Jonah Lehrer asks and answers this very question in his book “Imagine-How Creativity Works.” According to Jonah, it comes from a “steady rhythm of alpha waves emanating from the brain’s right hemisphere stimulated by relaxation.” We’ve all been there. Our greatest ideas come to us when we aren’t even trying to come up with an idea – while in the shower, on a walk, those moments just before we fall asleep.
Since Jonah is a neuroscientist, he won’t simply chalk creativity up to happenstance. There has to be a way to use science to understand how we can make ourselves more creative. He tells Sharon Waxman of the WaxWord blog on The Wrap, “One thing science can help us do is make sure we’re thinking in the right way at the right time. So I’m willing to trade a loss of romance, the slight pleasure of mystery, to figure out how to think and how to make ourselves more creative.”
So, maybe the role data storage plays in this scenario is quite simple…just hold the information until some great idea comes to us, then feed the fire of creativity. Or maybe, if you agree with Jonah and there are ways to harness the creativity inside all of us, then maybe the data we all store can tell us a lot more about ourselves. All of this talk about Big Data and what it can do to enable business is great, but perhaps more importantly, what can it tell us about us?
What if you could analyze the data on your hard drives, your personal cloud, your interactions in social media, your work, and through algorithms and analytics harness when you are most creative, where your inspiration comes from, and what you are meant to do? Think of Generation Y. The millions of young people that quite haven’t figured out what they want to do. Maybe their data storage and their own Big Data analytics can help point them in the right direction.
It’s not as scary, when we can use big data for our own personal creativity and growth. Heck businesses are using it for their own, why can’t we?
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