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Others argue that society loses through open sourced goods. Because there is a loss in monetary incentive to the creation of new goods, some argue that new products will not be created. This argument seems to apply particularly well to the business model where extensive research and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. However, this argument ignores the fact that cost reduction for all concerned is perhaps an even better monetary incentive than is a price increase. In addition, others argue that visual art and other works of authorship should be free. These proponents of extensive open source ideals argue that monetary incentive for artists would perhaps better be derived from performances or exhibitions, in a similar fashion to the funding of provision of other types of services.

Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.

HCI practitioners have explored how software interfaces can enhance and support users in general and creativity in particular. Its analytical tools for examining the relationships between tools and a concrete group of users vis-à-vis a well-defined explication of tasks both solve and create problems. The ability to specify these relationships explicitly greatly facilitates the design of systems; yet that same explicit specificity also defines creativity a priori in cybernetic terms more friendly to computers than to the culturally diverse and rich practice of creativity

Critical theory—an umbrella term that encompasses literary theory, continental philosophy, and communication theory, among others—offers sophisticated theoretical resources for the study of cultural artifacts and their use in the communities that create them. Many of these theories ground themselves in the materiality of the cultural artifacts they study; yet the material layer for which these theories were once developed were largely textual. The movement of cultural artifacts from the physical to digital poses a deep challenge (and some risk) for critics studying digital media with these theories

HCI often characterizes creativity in rationalistic, intentional, and scientific ways. For example, Schneiderman (2002, 2003) proposes a creativity framework for, in his words, “generating excellence” with four parts: collect, relate, create, and donate. With it, he hopes to capture the social, iterative, associational, and distributional characteristics of creativity, especially as described by cognitive science. Evident in this perspective is an effort to model creativity, which is seen as a social activity, with certain structural features that take place in environments conducive to creativity.

The role of the author-function is, among other things, to control the polyvalence intrinsic to texts, such that the author, rather than performing the creative role of bringing the text into the world, performs the role of constraining the meaning of the text within a society.

(Foucault, 1969/2000, p. 206). Therefore, writing is a destabilizing force that threatens to transform the discourse in which it operates and to swallow up its own author. It is important to remember that Foucault is not limiting his analysis to literary texts; he explicitly includes scientific and academic writing,

Perhaps the foremost theorist of technological determinism is Jacques Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), who argues that individuals, science, and government are all “conditioned” by technology.

To answer this question, it is useful to consider what the three traditions share in common. All consider creativity in the context of professionalism and knowledge production. Creativity is not simply about painting a pretty new picture or expressing a personal emotion; it contributes to discourses about the world and our place in it. All three traditions also understand creativity as situated within systems—networks of software-supported experts, discursive sign systems, or systems of production and consumption. All of these implicitly reject romantic notions of the individual creative genius and pure self-expression; implied in this is a rejection or at least dilution of individual intention as the prime mover of creativity

Questions one might ask include the following: What are the social and technical conditions or structures necessary for the generation of these artifacts? What is the discourse of amateur multimedia? What is the minimal unit of meaning? In what ways does its production establish relationships between authors, viewers, technologies, meaning, and ideology?