Connected Creativity: The Impact of Web Search on Everyday Creative Thinking

With more than 60% of the world's population online, how does our rapidly evolving digital world impact creative processes and outcomes? On the one hand, there is the promise of the shared knowledge and ideas of humanity, readily available at our fingertips, providing numerous starting points from which to develop new ideas. On the other hand, we may be overwhelmed by the volume of information, struggle to find and identify quality information to form the basis of a creative thinking process, and instead fall back on common, accepted ideas. Throughout this article, we place creators and creating in the ubiquitous situated context of searching the World Wide Web (i.e., the Web) and consider the implications for a range of everyday creative thinking processes. Research in this area is surprisingly limited, and a number of suggestions are made to take this area forward as the Web becomes an ever-expanding part of our cognitive ecology.