The Maker Movement: An Overview

The Maker Movement is making a big noise right now. A bit like my son, Perry, seen here in action in one of the two bands he's been playing in. Perry has discovered, like so many nowadays, that the digital environment is rejuvenating the art of making things in the physical world. Maker culture is rising in tandem with digital culture. This post will give you an overview of the Maker movement. 

I'm speaking more as an observer than a participant, though as I've read Chris Anderson's Makers (2012) it is inspiring me to try (in my own way) to become a "maker." That's not easy for me, having few crafting skills (with things; with words, that's different). In fact, in the past I have been taxed to my limit to help my sons create their pinewood derby cars for boy scouts. But Perry is showing me the way. He has become a legitimate maker. 

Perry has been making his own drum set -- but not by himself. He has told me how much helped he has gotten from an online community devoted to making drums (ghostnote.net). You can see Perry's drums that he has been making in the photos. In his performing and recording, he actually uses the things that he makes. 

So, I've assembled some basic info on makers and the maker movement, which I've put into my digital culture wiki under "maker" (reposted here):

Digital Culture: 13 Issues

What are the key issues in digital culture? I'm sure I've missed a few, but this list of 13 summarizes what we've explored in a semester of studying digital culture. What do you think? (Taken from the essay exam portion of my students' final for the course). See the questions in detail below the list:

1. Connect or Disconnect
   
2. Openness vs. Control
3. Beta vs. Formal 
4. Public vs. Private 
5. Evolving Literacy 
6. Coping 
7. Creativity in the Digital Age
8. Virtual Worlds
9. Video Games and Gamification 
10. Digital Civics 
11. Identity 
12. Print vs. Digital 
13. Change and Innovation

Literature: A Lifeline in the Sea of Digital Culture

Literature is a great way to come to terms with digital culture -- and I'm just talking about novels that explicitly deal with technology or its consequences, though there are some good ones of that sort. No, I mean the classics and I mean popular fiction. I mean travel literature and romance. I mean detective fiction and postcolonial fiction and all the rest. Digital culture is a swelling ocean that engulfs us, and works of literature can be our lifeline.

Coping with digital culture -- its novelty and utility, its efficiencies and distractions, its marvels and its tedium -- is a major theme of this blog and of my course in Digital Culture. To help in this regard, I've offered ideas on digital literacy; tools for better consuming information like Google Reader and diigo; as well as thoughts on using the new media with purpose, creativity, and for exploration. Consider literature one more strategy.

Miranda and Prospero from a seaside
production of The Tempest
(creative commons licensed by pyrogenic)

Literature, as it happens, provides a particularly rich mode of making sense of our brave new world.  This blog is called "brave new digital" in imitation of Miranda's comment in Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, when she first meets people on her enchanted island:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

The name Miranda literally means "ought to be beheld," and the idea of wonder pervades Shakespeare's play: there is magic, spectacle, and surprise throughout. Much of this comes from her wizard-father, Prospero, whose powers have come about through what? Books.

Books have always been associated with secret knowledge, and they can unlock benign powers (like Prospero's) or more corrupt sorts (like those of Dr. Faustus). Like the new media of our day, the Renaissance's new medium, the printed book, spread the hope and vision of new worlds (Thomas More's Utopia), or it indulged in the scandalous, the trivial, and the ridiculous. Literature has always been a coping medium and a conceptual vehicle -- providing lenses that help us to shape our responses to changing circumstances. It seems more than appropriate to make use of its powers now.

Review: Digital Culture

Digital Culture by Charlie Gere

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Gere's Digital Culture is among the best overviews on the topic I've encountered (after spending a summer immersing myself in many books on this subject). This book is readable, current (as of mid-2012) and manages not to immerse one in too much tech-speak. It covers the history of computing from a cultural point of view, and ties in 60s counter culture and arts movements in ways that I never realized were so formative of our current digital environment.

As someone who has studied the history of civilization and tried to connect this to our current day's digital world, I was especially appreciative of how he was able to describe various movements that led to what we would now call digital but which predate even electricity: capitalism, industrialization, intellectual practices of abstraction, algorithms, systems of cybernetic control -- various movements and ideologies from science, industry, economics, math, and language theory that are part of the conceptual infrastructure of our day as much as silicon is part of the technical infrastructure.

I'll never believe that computers are what make up digital culture again. They are a manifestation of other tendencies well under way and that we should appreciate separately from the briefer (though important) history of computation or communications technology. Great perspective.

A provocative concept from the book is the idea that in the modern world people have been fashioned into data objects (even prior to computers):

"...people are made visible as pieces of digital data. They are individuals, but their individuality is rationalized and normalized in a system of signs that also homogenizes them as a mass, and makes them interchangeable and manipulable as data."

Yikes. I've heard of people being objectified, but am I data-objectified by virtue of being a citizen of our modern world? We're all just a number, and that number is some combination of zeroes and ones.

View all my reviews