Is technology making us more creative?

While the web has facilitated a glut of unoriginal and trivial content, technology deserves some credit for lifting the barriers that inhibit creativity

Creativity is the ability to generate novel, useful ideas and innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas. With this in mind, it is tempting to suggest that technology has made us more creative: the digital revolution has clearly produced a large number of innovative products and services. Some of them have become multibillion pound companies and transformed a significant part of our lives. What these innovations have in common is that they level the gap between supply (of services or products) and consumer demand, much like with any effective entrepreneurial activity.

Aside from the obvious examples - Google, Airbnb, Uber, LinkedIn, Tripadvisor, Spotify and Whatsapp - there has been an explosion of creative activity in the technology space: there are over 3m apps, and 300 hours of YouTube video are uploaded every minute. According to some estimates, every two minutes we snap as many pictures as the entire population of the world did in the 1800s.