Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally “opportunities” appear when people connect with technologies that not only
allow them to share, participate, and collaborate but also enable them to express
their intrinsic creative desires. This simple tripartite process explains the basics for
the launching of any new creative technology, as a necessity to open up new oppor-
tunities for people to create and express self-talents and to answer to the means
generated by the participatory culture and the motivation people feel to get involved
in the process.
The digital participatory culture developed in recent years has been also respon-
sible for changes occurring in the funding of creative projects, albeit economic
views such as the
long tail
(Anderson
2006
) were insuffi cient to convince editors
and producers to give a green light to risky projects. Thus in 2009 a completely new
idea emerged among the social creative turbulence online, bringing the charity val-
ues into play and creating a crowd funding social software for creative work.
Kickstarter
is only one of these systems that allow any person to pledge for his
future work on journalism, music, fi lm, games, or even a start-up company. The
production here is reversed: consumers pay before consuming; they pay to see, hear,
or play; but they also pay to strengthen creative community values. No more editors,
people communicate directly, people share problems and share needs, and people
exchange knowledge and help each other. This is the fi nal frontier, where authors
meet receivers and interact for real and where all can be authors and consumers at
the same time.
1.4
Technological State of the Art
At the beginning of the 1980s, the fi rst home computers appeared, the microcom-
puters ZX Spectrum, BBC Microcomputer, and Commodore 64. Using these micro-
processors (which only had 8 bits, 16 Kb of RAM, no hard drive, and as support to
exchange content the old magnetic cassettes) changed the world of communication,
playing, and creation. In order to create games or applications, people needed to
know how to code BASIC, but BASIC couldn't serve the graphical needs of games,
so it would demand assembler skills, which is diffi cult for people with little or no
programming skills. What then happened was truly dignifying and representative of
the power of the communities and their sharing values. Some of programmers cre-
ated software packages that would help nonprogrammers to create their games.
Packages like
The Quill
(1983) by Howards Gilbert,
Games Designer
(1983) by
Quicksilva, and
Graphic Adventure Creator
(1985) by Incentive allowed people
with creative ideas for games to be able to create them. Although it was not of the
same quality of a program totally created from scratch in assembler, it was possible
for anyone to prototype and demonstrate his or her visions. These tools came with
what we call one of the fundamental basics of creative technologies, embedded
knowledge. Users were able to create new projects because tools were embedded
with knowledge from programmers in the form of editors, behaviours, and other
structures.
