Social Media and Creativity

Abstract

Emerging technologies and tools present new possibilities for creative production within social media spaces. This chapter focuses on the affordances of various social media platforms and how they present opportunities to support the ways in which young people interact with and learn from each other online. We examine these ideas by first highlighting relevant research in both the fields of social media and creativity. We then present examples of creative production and social media from thriving online communities with embedded social media networks – including Roblox, Scratch, and Ravelry – and discuss the implications for research on creativity. Within these contexts, we are interested in the creative acts enabled by social media that align with a view of personally valuable everyday creativity, works that sit at the intersection of collaborative practice, digital media production, and online peer-to-peer evaluations. Finally, we discuss the implications for today's youth, the potential diverse forms of creative social media hold, and why such vernacular forms of creativity are important for learning and development.