Keeping up with social media and Creativity

Once again, I am falling behind here. Meanwhile I'm all over other places on the internet.

I blogged about last week's performance of View Finder on the Propeller Dance Blog. That included uploading 277 photos to Flickr.

Also, I've been posting all sorts of things on the Astronaut Love Triangle Blog to inspire the group to new heights of artistic excellence. On the Astronaut Love Triangle Wiki, I've started making a list of creativity warm-ups.

I went looking for creativity warm-up exercises on the internet and found a startling lack of creativity about them. In particular, I kept finding suggestions that you get people to think of as many uses for a brick as they can imagine. I don't believe this is because there is something inherently creativity-inspiring about bricks. I think the people drafting the exercise couldn't be bothered to think of their own objects with non-obvious uses.

Just to check on this, I googled a series of phrases starting with "things you can do with a lightbulb" [There was only one when I did it, but there'll be at least two if you do it now.] "Things you can do with a brick" was the winner with 29 hits. [30 now]

This reminds me of a story that I heard from the famous Seymour Papert back in 1984. He had heard the story from Jean Piaget when he studied with him in the '60s.

It seems there was this elite school in France for artistic youth. One day they had a celebrated painter visiting them. At dinner, he asked about how they selected the students who would attend and they told him that they tested them for creativity.

"How do you test creativity?" he asked.

"We have a number of exercises and questions, for example, we ask them to list as many things as they can think of do with a brick."

"A brick..." said the artist. He pondered a while. "I suppose you could use it to build a house..." He thought more until the silence grew awkward and someone changed the topic.

Getting back to the internet and social media. I've signed up for two things that I just don't get. LinkedIn and Twitter. Am I missing something? Is there a point to either? Is there something beyond getting all my friends to join up so we can waste each others time and receive targeted advertising?