HW Creativity

 I believe that New Media fosters creativity in a multitude of ways. One platform at the forefront of this is Snapchat. Snapchat and it's ability to create quick, customized, and connected conversations is very powerful. The concept of sending a snapchat is taking a photo of yourself, a blank screen, or something else and sending that photo to one of your friends. However, an individuals has the ability to customize their photo in many ways. For example, they may add text on top of the photo to place a caption. They also have the ability to apply filters which change the coloration of the photo or add time stamps and weather. Users can also add a plethora of stickers, locations, and speech tools if they're making a video. However, the simplest tool which made Snapchat the holy grail of creativity was the pen. The pen was defaulted to a bright red which many millennials grew up using to draw, mark out, and caption their photos. Snapchat also connects to software like Bitmoji which allows individuals to create personalized avatars and place them on Snapchat's map to see where your friends are. A lot of this customization has aided users in becoming more creative and this can be connected to Lisa Mulcahy's article "How User Generated Content can Improve Your Social Media Marketing Strategy". In her article she depicts how companies can utilize the customized content created by users on various platforms to help market their company's software and tools. This is win win situation for companies and allows companies to understand how the users utilize their software the best.