Conformity & Creativity

conformity & creativity
Wikipedia defines conformity so:
'the degree to which members of a group will change their behaviour, views and attitudes to fit the views of the group.' As a psychological definition it is understandably couched in behavioural and observable terms - and fails to get to the heart of the matter, I think.
Something stronger, along the lines 'The degree of conformity of a unit is proportional to its residual frustration with the normal system' is more interesting to defend.

Clearly conformity is not merely 'doing what most people do' - nobody would describe military personnel as a non-conforming group of individuals - it is more like the degree to which people are satisfied by the available options. A person may 'fit in' with the '9 to 5' existence but privately feel frustrated long for something different - in this sense they are conforming only superficially, complying but not truly conforming. If, however, they go home, watch a sitcom about how laughable office life is, and return next day with a smile on their face, ready to face life with a new perspective; then they may be conforming. Conformity works in mysterious ways.

Any existence will offer a number of alternatives, simply as a way of inmproving the degree of conformity and reducing the degree of frustration within the system as a whole.
So the internet is an interesting thing: at an abstract level you would guess that increasing the degrees of freedom of a system (i.e. the total possible way in which all the units can be related together) is most likely to cause the system as a whole to settle on a new attractor - shifting to a new, more all-inclusive pattern. At an abstract level, then, the internet is a vast conformity-engine.

This seems counterintuitive, because the internet is superficially so diverse - and certainly you would predict that the medium-term impact will be massive disruption (as above). But from a wider perspective a different picture emerges: you can become quite frustrated and unconventional with only four options (or four 'channels') - but with vastly more options (or 'channels') almost everybody can be captured by the system considered as a whole.

Nobody need be frustrated - within the internet there is a norm to which to conform for all. In this way the internet fosters diversity to the extent that it creates conformity. Rather than four groups of people with many non-conformists we arrive at a thousand grups of people with hardly any non-conformists. What do people watch on youtube? They watch what everyone else watches - they start by sorting by most watched and watch the most watched.
Why should anyone care? It's as much a gut-feeling as anything: the sense that this 'frustration' and unconventionality is essential to something - to creativity, perhaps. That despite appearances to the contrary, the 'net'-result will be the substitution of variety for creativity.