Networks and creativity: the socio-cultural side of being creative.

This chapter examines creativity by considering its social and cultural components. Starting from the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) approach, the objective is to describe why creativity is a socially and culturally determined process, and describe some dynamics that characterize creativity in human activity systems. From this point of view, contradictions and expansive learning represent two key factors to find new solutions to rebalance the relations between the entities of human activity systems. The tension within a system or within a network or a group of persons is also a key element of many other processes trying to describe the social side of creativity, such as socio-cognitive conflict or divergent thinking. A new perspective that interconnects many of these concepts within a wide theoretical model is the Networked Flow. In addition to describing the longitudinal phase characterizing creative process in human networks, the Networked Flow also suggests several measures and analysis techniques - such as Social Presence and Social Network Analysis - to study and describe creative processes. In the last part of the chapter, some applications of this perspective are presented.