Creative Infrastructure, the concept used by magician Stewart James to help him develop magic routines, has three subsystems, as we discussed in the previous Broadcasting Brain post:

1. A mental and physical state that fosters creativity

2. A system for storing, retrieving, and sharing information

3. A system that encourages mentorship

Creative Infrastructure 2.0 augments the above sub-systems using social media and other Web technologies to help you collect valuable and interesting information, communications, and other contacts from around the world to help fuel your creative fires.  It can be a great step along the road to self-actualization.

Now we’ll unpack these concepts into some more detail for you to consider.

1. A mental and physical state that fosters creativity

David Ben, in Advantage Play, mentioned the power of positive thinking with regards to the best mental state for generating ideas and solving problems. Other phrases like the following also capture this:

• “Can do!”
• “Just do it.”

There are lots of people who written things about the power of positive thinking. Without going into specifics (or extremes), let’s assume that they are right and there’s value in believing in possibilities. Actually, it’s rather important that you do believe in the power of positive thinking, at least a little, or this won’t work for you.

This winning mental and physical state to foster creativity has the following characteristics:

a) All answers or solutions pre-exist in this world – in short, the answer is out there, waiting to be discovered. Believing that possible ideas and solutions are out there, waiting to be found, is an important tool to help find those solutions.

b) The creative process is a journey to a destination in the mind – the intellect and imagination, all contained within your head, can be used to help discover the ideas by helping your thought process go from point A to point B.

c) The creative process is a partnership with the mind – if you regard your mind as a separate entity and use it to internally discuss or debate ideas, it can become an even more powerful ally. This concept may have helped Stewart James to tap into his unconscious mind more effectively than most other people.

d) Creative dialog (or creativity) is not limited to certain times of day – James did not want any barriers placed on his creative work, including the “best” time of day to do creative work.

e) Being an independent thinker means you will have to face and move past criticism – stick to your guns and follow the thought process wherever it takes you and in spite of any criticism you face as long as you are following a reasonable process.

It’s clear that James had developed a mindset that was unrelentingly positive, ambitious, and focused. It’s also clear that he was successful in developing over 1,000 magic routines. This part of Stewart James’s Creative Infrastructure concept doesn’t change in Creative Infrastructure 2.0.

2. A system for storing, retrieving, and sharing information

Information storage, retrieval, and sharing is a great use for Web 2.0 technologies; in fact, it’s the prime reason they should exist. This is the heart of Creative Infrastructure 2.0. Stewart James was forced to use many pencils, papers, filing cabinets and time to store, index and retrieve information. Today it boggles the mind to think of the multitude of ways that we can get, index, retrieve, and share information via electronic means. In years past, professionals would do the following to stay informed and learn new things:

• subscribe to magazines, journals, newsletters
• read books
• attend clubs, meetings, and conferences
• correspond with other professionals

and so on. These methods are still used today. However, let’s look at the ways to get information via the Web. These technologies have removed a lot of the time and effort from the processes of acquisition and delivery of information. These information streams or feeds can be divided up into different methods, depending on your preferences and your desire for automation:

Community Sharing

Groups share and discuss information about topics of interest:

• Social networks: Facebook/Orkut/MySpace/LinkedIn
• Ning Communities: combine individual pages and blogs with message boards and internal messaging
• Forums/message boards
• Listservs/E-Mail lists

Communities can be organized around multiple demographic parameters, but shared interests are normally the most powerful way to find and distribute relevant information. Communities share entire articles in addition to links, have discussions, hold debates, and otherwise provide a wealth of information to their members. Some of these networks are more social (i.e. chatty, humorous, fun, and lightweight) than others. Others are dead serious about their subject matter. You need to do some research and check around to find the right communities that support your interests.

Purposeful Sharing

These methods consist of sharing links to documents or topics that interest you or a group of people:

• Social Bookmarking: Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Netvouz, Furl, etc. – tends to be better for information that the user wants to retrieve again at some point in time.
• Social News: Digg, Mixx, Reddit and more – tends to be more transient, focused on current or sensational events. These sites are a better way to monitor popular topics at a given point in time.
• Social browsing: StumbleUpon – tends to be used to track similar types of information that are also stored within social news sites, but has a combination of randomness and recommendation that makes it uniquely interesting.
• Microblogging (sharing to your friends and followers)

Each of these types of applications creates RSS feeds for each user’s activity, allowing you to subscribe and monitor their output. Thus, the information comes to you. These applications are built to be able to track websites or document link submissions. Over time, if you follow a particular user you will get a sense of their interests and the quality of the material that they share. Note that this shared data is open and available to anyone as it is not bound within the confines of a community website.

Blog Harvesting

You subscribe to individual blogs that interest you or else you search certain topics/blogs on a regular basis:

• Blog Search – Google Blog Search is probably the top application for searching blog content.
• RSS Readers/E-Mailed information – by subscribing to RSS feeds you can stay on top and informed of individual blogs or websites.
• Blog Directories (MyBlogLog; Blog Catalog; Technorati, Alltop, etc.) – searching through blog directories will deliver results similar to blog searches, but will be focused on the blogs contained within the directory.

Article Directories

Article directories are static repositories of articles. The number of articles grows over time, but there’s typically little community built around them. They are useless without good search capabilities, however. Examples include:

• User Generated Content: Helium, Triond, Suite101, Associated Content, etc.
• Other article directories
• Wikis/online knowledge bases

These are four ways to group information sources for you to explore and find them. The advantage of some of these resources is that you can subscribe to them or sign up as a user to check in on them on a regular basis.

3. A system that encourages mentorship

Social media provides multiple touchpoints and access to lots of people, mainly through the communities and the types of websites listed above. Fictional magicians are often portrayed as either having or being apprentices (similar to the Jedi Knights of Star Wars) and that continues to hold true today, informally or not. We learn from other people, especially the advanced stuff.

Today’s social media have helped to multiply the different ways that people can interact with each other. As communities spring up online, it becomes clear who the smartest people are. Fortunately, many of these people are eager, willing, and able to share knowledge.

In the past it may have taken months or years to find the right mentor for you. Today, that time can be measured in hours or minutes until you find someone who can act as a mentor to you.

In conclusion

If there’s anything that I’ve tried to show in these articles, it’s the availability of both informational resources and people via the social web.

Creative Infrastructure 2.0 is the wide collection of social applications, databases, and networks to expose yourself to different ideas and ways of doing things. You can sign up for automated feeds of data, just as people used to subscribe to journals, or you can plumb through the depths of data using search engine technology to find the answers you seek.

I, for one, would have loved to see what a creative man like Stewart James could have accomplished with access to all of this information.

And what are YOU going to do with all of this wealth of knowledge? How do you tap into it? Why not share your thoughts in the comments section?

Stay tuned and don’t forget to subscribe by RSS reader or E-Mail updates (assuming you haven’t already) so you won’t miss what comes next.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Captions on the front of digital photos
• Is creativity in danger of becoming the new Web 2.0?
• Introduction to Creative Infrastructure 2.0
• The importance of good taste
• Thinking Inside The Brain – Episode 1