Creativity Is the Next Economic Revolution | Christina Miller | Big Think

[Music] So, screen time. I think a lot of people do different things on their screens at this point. So, it is a little bit of a traditional point of, "Hey, too much screen time is bad for you," because, at least for people my age, you think of that meaning too much TV.

So, it's about there being choice and control of what that screen time is. So, are you playing games? Are you watching content? Are you creating stuff? Are you, you know, is it a passive experience or is it an active experience? When things work best, you're also able to connect the digital to the physical.

I think that there's a large gray area now between too much screen time; it just needs to be defined a bit better. Do you mean too much of a passive watching experience, or do you mean the ability to do a lot of different things - to be empowered to create, to be given tools for creative expression, to be problem-solving and collaborative while being entertained? I think, if it's that latter, you'd find people saying, right, at the age we serve, which is generally 6 plus, that there's, I think, more good than bad.

If, in fact, it's an active immersive experience as opposed to a one-way passive experience. We call them plurals. So, yeah, we've done a lot of generational research, and overall, for a returner, and that was the term that I guess we collectively, obviously, Time Warner as an organization, had coined very early on, before they were called Generation Z.

Which I think, in fairness, is a little less descriptive, and it just comes from, you know, "Hey, we were Generation Y; we were Generation X," so you just go down the alphabet. But a lot of people have different names, plurals, because of the plurality of the way they consume content and everything they do.

It really, if Millennials needed lists because they didn't come of age, truly, the information revolution was happening around them, and they needed help filtering, sorting things out, this generation doesn't. They are really comfortable with choice, and they actually want to control it.

And if you don't move quick enough for them, like Thomas Friedman, "Thank you for being late," if you don't move quick enough for them, they just move on to the next thing. Because they really, they realize that they have a whole lot of choice, and they want to control that.

So, I think the plurality of everything available to them is more indicative than just the letter. So, Cartoon Network focuses really on creative confidence and this core belief that we have an obligation to raise the next generation of creators, makers, and innovators.

So, if you believe that there was an industrial revolution and information revolution, we believe that the next one is all about creativity. That, you know, if there was a time where people would refer to geeks inheriting the earth, well, I think the whole-brain thinkers and the creative folks will really be the ones that supercharge innovation in the future.

And making sure that kids know that if you learn things like coding and computer science, that it doesn't just mean engineer or programmer, but it can mean animator, video game developer. It can mean learning skills for self-expression that will help you through the rest of your life.

I grew up Generation X over here. I grew up, and I was always told that team sports really helped you in the future, so that it built better leaders, it helped you with working in a larger team.

If you believe that - and there's definitely some truth to it - but if you apply that to things like coding and giving kids creative tools to learn self-expression, that ability to solve problems, to work collaboratively, to create and make will serve them and ready them for anything that comes next. Not just necessarily to, "Hey, be an animator."

So, I think that's the, if you want to change the world, you start with kids because everything else is iterative. If you really buy into that, I think that's the higher thinking reason why to do it. On the flip side of the commercial reason why to do it, I would say is they expect it from us.

You know, at the earliest stages, they're starting to, again, learn to swipe before anything else, learning to participate in their media. Whether it means they go and they play Minecraft, and they start to add to that building, or they want to play games that allow them to, you know, draw whiskers on things or pretty ears on things, they expect there to be some amount of give and get.

And us meeting their expectations is core to what we do. Our job is to serve audiences that are growing up mobile, like plurals or Generation Z. Everybody seems to have as many names for them as screens they use, quite frankly. So, they expect things to be mobile. It's all they've ever known.

So, making sure that we can meet to exceed the expectations of this audience who want choice and control expects things to be very visual in nature. A lot of that feeds into how we think about creating content. From inception to create content and experiences that puts them at the forefront has to reflect them.

So, a lot of the ways we find our way into that sweet spot between creativity and technology is by reflecting our audience. And then, of course, we want to do right by them, both in the day-to-day and sort of in a big way. [Music]