A Memetic Perspective for Collaborative Creativity Studies
Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
ABSTRACT
Creativity has usually been considered as the individual capacity of generating creative ideas or products. But in today’s society, collaborative creativity can be observed more and more often in many creativity-related fields, such as the development of open-source software (OSS) and the utilization of user-generated content (UGC). In academia, the studies related to creativity have never stopped being advanced and have been extended from psychology to many other disciplines. Many scholars have identified the collaborative nature of creativity and have proposed theories to explain it. But these latest academic achievements are not reflected in the general public understanding of creativity today. For example, the dictionary (Hornby, Wehmeier, & Ashby, 2000) explanation for the word “creativity” is actually inherited from an ability definition made by Sternberg (Sternberg, 1999), and the current Wikipedia entry (contributors, 2018) for creativity only integrates Csikszentmihalyi’s phenomenon definition (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988) to this ability definition. Both definitions were developed about 20 years ago, and both of these sources only addressed individual creativity. Considering these quite limited definitional circumstances, this paper is trying to establish a consolidated theoretical framework for contemporary creativity studies. As well as incorporating most existing creativity theories, this framework shall cover both individual and collaborative creativity.