One of the most interesting findings (for me at least) of the last Pew survey on weblogging was that the top motivation for it was the expression of creativity. I have been trying to find a literature that talks about the importance of being able to express one's self creatively that doesn't mainly relate either to education or to creativity as a way of gaining access to a group with status (eg fan creativity). It seems a lot of the work by scholars like Henry Jenkins agrees tacitly that the Internet is giving people who might not have other avenues for creativity a chance to be creative and this is good but I don't recall coming across anyone who elaborates on this except Willis, P. (1990). Common culture : symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young. Buckingham, Open University Press and (in passing) Atton, C. (2001) "The Mundane and Its Reproduction in Alternative Media", Journal of Mundane Behavior, 2 (1). http://www.mundanebehavior.org/issues/v2n1/atton.htm There's also RodrÃguez, C. (2001) Fissures in the Mediascape : An International Study of Citizens' Media, Hampton Press, Cresskill, N.J. and others writing about alternative media but they mostly concentrate on the political benefits of being able to express yourself. I am more interested in broader sociological issues. Anyway, any ideas? an --- David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London School of Economics & Political Science <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm> Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/ (personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog) Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ dealingwithemail/> callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger and net phone)