Anyone can be creative?

I have many times and in many ways struggled with a tortuous dichotomy. I am a creative director by way of the writing side, but my goal would be the same if I were first an art director: synthesis, a way to meld competing or conflicting impulses into a stronger whole than either way alone. This goes not only for the compounding of words and pictures but the assiduous building and support of a brand -- which ultimately resonates through words and images, and perhaps some day not far off through all five senses.

Design-side creative directors often encounter, to their frustration, audiences who miss the point of their work by limiting their reactions to their personal experience, their own idiosyncratic frame of reference.  I am worried that this proclivity among viewers is only going to get more pronounced. Digital cameras, easy-to-use illustration and layout and photo manipulation programs, web site editors and creators like Dreamweaver, animation programs . . . these all foster the dangerous illusion than anyone can be genuinely creative, that talent no longer matters. This phantasm beguiles on the verbal side, too. People easily forget that the end product is not the result of the tools used to create it but the ideas and intuition and professional experience of the human being using the tools -- and often, human beings: only a few creative processes these days avoid collaboration at some stage or level.

I think we are in an uncomfortable phase that is over-dependent on, and over-awed by, technology. It is so easy to be dazzled. We use it for its own sake. The Icarus myth is at least in part a trope about the naive and almost touchingly intoxicating lift of a new way of doing things that promises much but fatally under-delivers at a critical time the pink soft hands that hold it.
Technology can make a -- to rely on current mythology -- very impressive light saber, but only a Jedi can wield it.