Stepping Outside

In the appendix to his final project, “Art Between Worlds,” crashingintowalls remarks: I struggle with the fact that much of the creativity present online draws energy from the embodied world but feels no compunction to reinvest in it, hyperlinking and posting comments instead. I find this comment very apposite to my present situation; that is, after a morning spent sitting here working on ideas for blog and wiki stuff, for thesis stuff -- and let’s be honest -- weeks spent drawing heavily on all my word-related sources of creativity, I hit yet another of those walls where I realized that I couldn’t write anymore, no less think anymore, until I stepped out into the world, exposed my ever-paler skin to the winter sunshine, and rediscovered the type of human contact that does not occur through a computer screen.

And it worked. I’ve found there are still a few more posts and ideas left to be wrung out of me, but crashingintowalls is right: the energy I’ve regained is going back through the screen. But doesn’t there have to be a more optimistic, or at least more equivalent reading of that interaction? As in, I hope that when I ventured out to gain energy I was also giving it -- don't the laws of physics that I learned in high school and forgot in college state somewhere that energy must remain constant? Yes! Conservation of energy law! I’d be interested to hear what crashingintowalls or anyone else thinks about this. Is the line of give-and-take between online creativity and real world creativity that clear cut, or is there a necessary flow?