Creative Mornings is a worldwide initiative for creative people to meet up and network over coffee and croissant and listen to a short talk on an aspect of creativity. Today a new chapter met for the first time in Derby so I went along to get to know the creative inhabitants of this city with a growing creative vibe.
A wide range of people attended including marketeers, creative business owners, artists, writers and graphic design freelancers. The interesting thing was the instant connection with everyone – a passion for creativity, the challenges of maintaining creativity and maintaining a meaningful presence in the age of social media.
The talk was by Paul Chapman and he gave us a very personal account of the challenges of dealing with information overload and cyber aggression in particular. He reminded us that it’s too easy to fall into the habit of being online for 12 hours a day and feel the urge to respond instantly to every email, every post we disagree with and every customer has had a point to prove. Paul urged us to learn to pause, a simple message but it really resonated with the audience. If we pause before responding to everything we see and read we can save ourselves from entering into a plethora of online arms races for dominance.
The Internet is a very complex world to navigate and rather than wait for government to try and regulate our experiences maybe we need a simple solution. Pausing for thought (dare I say mindfulness) may be worth a try.