Why should we put our work on the Web? Give it a Creative Commons license so people can share it and remix it? Why? What’s the use? Attribution? What for?
I’ve struggled with questions like these for years. Whether asking myself or responding to a colleague, my answers struggled to establish the value of sharing creative works beyond the peers in the classroom or school. I knew the value was there. I just couldn’t articulate it well. But now I have two real-life stories to tell.
Looking for a light read this drowsy Saturday morning, I chose The Story of the Fail Whale by Sarah Perez. Sarah captured my attention with her recount of the Fail Whale’s rise to stardom. But her story about the unknown Fail Whale artist’s work turning into a social media brand really woke me up. In the beginning, the artist of the Fail Whale, Yiying Lu, did not profit from Twitter’s use of the Fail Whale. Twitter grabbed the image from iStockPhoto and did not link to her. The more Twitter crashed the more Fail Whale grew in popularity. Strange, isn’t it? Anyway, a homemade Fail Whale t-shirt appeared at a party one night. It gained a lot of attention, so after the party the owner contacted Yiying Lu and encouraged her to open a Zazzle story where she could sell her work. She did and fans tweeted its arrival. What ensued, Perez describes as a “torrent of social media cooperation” that uplifted Yiying Lu and her work to high levels of recognition that gain her recognition, profits from sales, and most likely some future design work.
Yiying Lu put her creative work out there for free. Eventually, it became a social object. The art work and the people who rallied around it built her success. Yiying Lu made it happen by sharing her work on the Web.
The story of Yiying Lu resembles that of JIm Gourley and his CCTV photos. Jim is an avid photographer, writer, and inspirational member of our school community. On December 4th of last year, Jim began to take photos of the CCTV construction project.
CCTV Headquarters Bldg., Beijing, China — December 5, 2007 Photo by Jim Gourley.
He now has thousands of photos in his Flickr collection called Beijing and Architecture. You can see his CCTV photos in its set called Cite Chaillot. He tagged them and opened them to all with a Creative Commons license. Eventually, some architects interested in the unique CCTV Headquarters rising above Beijing neighborhoods discovered Jim’s photos. In his blog post Footnoted, Jim seems reluctant to tell us “This obsession of mine has seemed to have gotten some notice. A few weeks ago the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine (CAPA), Paris, contacted me to use 120 of my photos of the CCTV Headquarters project in their upcoming exhibit “Dans la ville chinoise,” which includes an exhibition on Chinese contemporary emerging architecture. The show runs from June 18 to September 19, 2008.” Link
This is another example of a person’s creative work becoming a social object, helping to develop a community, fostering creativity. How? He put it on the Web and leveraged the power of crowds.
The next time I’m challenged to defend a decision to put creative work beyond the classroom walls and bulletin boards, I can talk about the Fail Whale and the CCTV photos. They are not Sputniks, but these successes can dispel the fear and doubt and cause change.
Tags: cooperation, social object, cctv, fail whale
