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MAKING IS CONNECTING

The social power of creativity, from craft and knitting to digital everything

Second expanded edition

DAVID GAUNTLETT

polity

Copyright© David Gauntlett 2018

The right of David Gauntlett to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copynght, Designs and Parents Act 1988.

Firsr edition published in 2011 by Polity Press This second edition published in 2018 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambriclge CB2 !UR, UK

Polity Press IO I Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA

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TSBN-13: 978-1-5095-13➔7-5 JSBN-13: 978-1-5095- IHS-l(pb)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gauntlett, David, author. Title: Making is connectin~ : the social power of creativity, from craft and

knitting to rugiral ev::'l'°'ing / David Gauntlen.. . .. Description: Second edioon. I .\1edford, MA : Pobty, 2018.- I_ ReV1Sed edition

of the author's Making is connecnng, 2011. I Includes b1bhograph1ca l references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017043969 (Print) I LCCN 2017052215 (ebook) I ISBN 9781509513512 (Epub) I ISBN 9781509513475 Q1ardback) I ISBN 978 15095IH82 (paperback) . . . . . ,

Subjects: LCSH: Social networks. I Creaove ab1hty--SOC1al aspects. I ~ eb . 2.0-Social aspects. I Culture. I BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE I ~erua Studies.

Classification: LCC HM741 (ebook) I LCC HM741 .G38 2018 (prmt) I DDC 302.30285-dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043969

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Vl

Preamble to the second edition 1 1 Introduction 9 2 The meaning of making I: Philosophi es of craft 30 3 The meanin g of making II: Craft today 56 4 The meaning of making ill: Digital 91 5 The value of connecti ng: Personal happin ess and

social capital 112 6 Tools for change 146 7 Online creativity needs better platforms 165 8 Making connections and th e creative process:

From music to everything 192 9 Doing it yourself: More lessons from music

making and connecting 207 10 Platfo rms for creativity 231 11 Conclusion 252

Notes 277 Index 313

6 PREAMBLE

conclusion list are new, as is the section on 'Developing and connecting creativity';

• Many other things have been amended, rewritten, added and updated throughout.

1

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about what happens when people make things. I hope it will add to the conversation about the power of the internet and digital technologies - a place where we have seen everyday creativity flourish over the past twenty-five years. But people have been making things - and th.inking about the meaning of making things - for a very long time. And the power of making, and connecting through creating, extends well beyond the online world to al1 kinds of activities in everyday life.

I hope to pul1 some of these things together, in ways which are hopefully not too obvious as we start. You may reasona- bly wonder, for instance, how a commentary by Victorian art critic John Ruskin on medieval cathedrals can have affected my understanding of YouTube videos. And you may be surprised when the nineteenth-century socialist and tapestry-weaver William Morris dispenses a blueprint for the making and sharing ethos of social media in general, and Wikipedia in par- ticular, 120 years early. We will note how the former Catholic

10 INTRODU C TION

priest and radical philosopher Ivan Illich outlined the neces- sary terms of human happiness, forty years ago, see how it lines up with the latest studies by economists and social scientists today, and then connect it with knitting, guerrilla garden- ing and creative social networks. But not necessarily in that order. We will encounter the 1970s feminist Rozsika Parker, explaining embroidery as a 'weapon of resistance', and several knitters, carpenters, musicians and bloggers, and they will help us to think about how making things for ourselves gives us a sense of wonder, agency, and possibilities in the world.

MAKI NG IS CONNECTING

This brings us to the title of the book: 'Making is connect- ing'. It's a perfectly simple phrase, of course. But having spent some time thinking about people making things, and people connecting with others - making and connecting - I realized that it was meaningful, and more pleasing, to note that these are one and the same process: making is connecting.

I mean this in three principal ways:

• Making is connecting because you have to connect things together (materials, ideas, or both) to make something new;

• Making is connecting because acts of creativity usually involve, at some point, a social dimension and connect us with other people;

• And making is connecting because through making things and sharing them in the world, we increase our engagement and connection with our social and physical environments.

Of course, there will be objections and exceptions to each of these, which we may consider along the way. But that's my basic set of propositions.

I NT RODU G TIO~ 11

THREE REASO 1 S WHY I WANTED TO WRITE

THIS BOOK

This book came about because of a number of things I had been thinking about, which I hope are worth listing briefly here.

First, I started out as a sociologist interested in the place of media in people's lives. That was okay for a while, but twenty and even fifteen years ago, the main media that people were usually dealing with were produced by big pro- fessional organizations, and it seemed somewhat subservient to be exploring what people were doing with their products. Some of the activity was quite active, thoughtful and imagi - native, some of it was mundane, and none of it could score very highly on a scale of creativity because it was all about creative works made by other people. Thankfully, the World Wide Web soared in popularity, becoming mainstream in itself, and opened up a world of diversity and imagination where the content itself is created by everyday users (as well as a growing number of professionals). This opportunity to make media and, in particular, share them easi ly, making connections with others, was unprecedented in both char- acter and scale, and therefore a much more exciting thing to study.

Second, this exciting world of participation was, therefore, an exciting thing to participate in myself I've always liked making things, but they didn't have an audience. With the Web, making writings, photographs, drawings - and indeed websites themselves - available to the world was so easy. It was also rewarding, as people would see your stuff and then send nice comments and links to their own. So I experienced the feeling that making is connecting for myself.

Third, and stemming from the academic interests men- tioned in the first point, I was meant to be doing research

12 INTROIJI J GTION

a bout what people did, and why, but had a I ways been uncom- fortable with the idea of just speaking to them, taking them through an 'interview' for my own purposes, without giving them anything very interesting to do. Therefore, over the past twenty years, I have been developing 'creative research methods' where people are asked to make something as part of the process. The idea is that going through the thought- fuJ, physical process of making something- such as a video, a drawing, a decorated box, or a LEGO model- an individual is given the opportunity to reflect, and to make their thoughts, feelings or experiences manifest and tangible. This unusual experience gets the brain firing in different ways, and can generate insights which would most likely not have emerged through directed conversation. I have found that the process is especially revealing and effective when people are asked to express themselves using metaphors. All of this was discussed in my earlier book Creative &plorations. 1 In these stud- ies it was clear that thinking and making are aspects of the same process. Typically, people mess around with materials, select things, experimentally put parts together, rearrange, play, throw bits away, and generally manipulate the thing in question until it approaches something that seems to com- municate meanings in a satisfying manner. This rarely seems to be a matter of 'making what I thought at the start', but rather a process of discovery and having ideas through the process of making. In particular, taking time to make some- thing, using the hands, gave people the oppornmity to clarify thoughts or feelings, and to see the subject-matter in a new light. And having an image or physical object to present and discuss enabled them to communicate and connect with other people more directly.

Maybe in the end that's more than three, but for all these reasons I wanted to explore the idea that making is connecting.

INTROO llGTJON t:J

SOCIAL .M E DIA AS AN IDEA AND A METAPHOR

This book does not suppose that creative activities have sud- denly appeared in the story of human life because someone invented the internet. However, the internet - in particular through tl1e World Wide Web which emerged in the early 1990s, and the mobile apps which burst into people's lives in the late 2000s - has certainly made a huge difference. The internet made it massively easier for everyday people to share the fruits of their creativity with others, and to collabora- tively make interesting, informative and entertaining cultural spaces. This process has been boosted by the emergence of social media. In the first edition of tlus book, I talked about 'Web 2.0', which was what we caLied it then, although I had to explain that 'Web 2.0' was not a particular kind of tech- nology, or a business model, and was definitely not a sequel to the Web as previously known.

Nowadays we say 'social media' to mean basically the same thing, and they're all around us, a lot - even if you don't use social media, you hear about them all the time in the news - but it's worth taking a moment to consider the distinctive approach of social media platforms compared to, say, traditional websites.

I used to explain the difference between the older and newer models with a Powerpoint slide showing gardens and an allotment, that I made using LEGO (figure 1). In the first decade or so of the Web's existence (from the 1990s to the early to mid-2000s), websites tended to be like sep- arate gardens. So for example the NASA website was one garden, and my Theory.org.uk website was anotl1er garden, and a little-known poet had made her own poetry website, which was another garden. You could visit them, and each of them might be complex plots of creative and beautiful con- tent, but basically they were separate, with a fence between

lNTRODllCTJON

Early websites ('Web 1.0']

Social media ['Web 2.0')

Figure 1: Social media as a comm tmal allotment

each one. There's nothing wrong with this model, as such; it works perfectly well as a platform for alJ kinds of individuals, groups, or organizations, big and small, to make stuff avail- able online. But this model is what we could now call 'Web 1.0'. By contrast, the newer model, whether we call it Web 2.0 or social media, is like a collective allotment. Instead of individuals tending their own gardens, they come together to work collaboratively in a shared space.

This is acrually what Tim Berners-Lee had meant his World Wide Web to be like, when he invented it in 1990. He imagined that browsing the Web would be a matter of writing and editing, not just searching and reading. The first years of the Web, then, were an aberration, and it has only more recently blossomed in the way its creator intended.

I clearly remember that when I read about this read/write model in Berners-Lee's book, Weaving the Web, when it was published in 1999, it seemed like a nice idea, but nai've, and

I NTRODUGTlON

honkers. How could it possibly work? I didn't want to spend hours crafting my lovely webpages only for some visitor to come along and mess them up. But of course, my problem

shared with most other people at the time - was that I had not lea med to recognize the power of the network. We still thought of everybody 'out there' as basically 'audience'.

At the heart of social media is the idea that online sites and services become more powerful the more that they embrace this network of potential collaborators. Rather than just seeing the internet as a broadcast channe l, which brings an audience to a website (the '1.0' model), social media invite users in to play. Sites and apps such as YouTube, Twitter and Wik.ipedia only exist and have value because people use and contribute to them, and they are clearly better the more people are using and contributing to them. This is the essence of social media.

So social media are about harnessing the collective abilities of the members of an online network, to make an especially powerful resource or service. But, thinking beyond the inter- net, it may also be valuable to consider social media as a kind of metaphor, for any collective activity which is enabled by people's passions and becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.

In the books We Think by Charles Leadbeater, and both Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, the authors discuss the example of Wikipedia, noting the impressive way in which it has brought together enthusi- asts and experts, online, to collaboratively produce a vast encyclopaedia which simply would not exist without their millions of contributions. 2 These contributions, of course, are given freely, and without any reward (apart, of course, from the warm glow of participation, and the very minor recognition of having your username listed somewhere in an article's history logs). Both authors then go on to consider

10 INTUOOUCTIO

whether the Wikipedia model of encyclopaedia-making can be translated across to - well, everytlung else. In these cases, Wi.kipedia becomes a metaphor for highly participatory and industrious collaboration. However, most of the time they're not really thinking of 'everytlung else' - it's 'everything else online'. Wikipedia becomes a model of highly participatory and industrious online col laboration. But the really powerful metaphorical leap would be to go from digital media to real life - the social world and all its complexities, not just from Wikipedia to other internet services.3

So, in this book we will, in part, be taking the message of making, sharing, and collaboration, which has become famil- iar to the people who enthuse about social media, and seeing if it works in a broader context - in relation to both offline and online activities - and with bigger issues: real social problems rather than virtual online socializing. This con- nects with the argument - or the hope - that we are seeing a shift away from a 'sit back and be told' culture towards more of a 'making and doing' culture. The 'sit back and be told' position is forcefully introduced in schools, and then gently reinforced by television and the magk of the glossy, shiny and new in consumer culture; the 'making and doing' is what this boobs all about.

TIIE 'SIT BACK AND BE TOLD ' CUL TUR£

Since the historical point at which education became insti- tutionalized in a system of schools, learning has become a process directed by a teacher, whose task it is to transfer nuggets of knowledge into young people's minds. It has not always been this formulaic, of course, and some teachers have always sought to inspire their students to produce their own perspectives on art, poetry, or science. Nevertheless, and in spite of some innovative pedagogical thinking in the 1960s

INTROD U CTION 1 7

and 1970s, schoo l education since the 1980s has tended to settle around a model where a body of knowledge is input into students, who are tested on their grasp of it at a later point. Over time, the tests have become increasingly formal- ized, and have been used to assemble league tables of schools, which in turn mean that each school has a vested interest in getting chi ldren to do well in the tests. Governments around the world seem to fee l obliged to commit to the notion of 'testing and accountability' even though all the evidence sug- gests that quality learning is destroyed by an over-emphasis on testing.'~

Meanwhile, the twentieth century was emphatically the era of 'sit back and be told' media: especially in the second half of that century, leisure time became about staying in, not going out, and remaining pretty much in the same spot for long chunks of time, looking at a screen. This remains the case: in 2017, Americans watched on average more tl,an four and a ha lf hours of television per day, much as they had clone for several decades, even though this viewing is now joined by the use of other digital devices.5 In the UK, it's just under four hours per day.6 This is, of course, a Jot, and since it's an average, you know that for everybo<ly watching less than this, there are as many other people watching more. (The good news is that the twentieth-century technology is primarily popular with those rooted in the twentieth century. The steady average television viewing figures hide the fact that younger people are watching TV much less - although they are using a much wider range of screen-based services. The Nielsen 2017 data for the US, for instance, shows that the average TV viewing of those aged thirty-seven and under is less than half that of those aged over thirty-eight and older.)

Marshall McLuhan's famous statement that 'the medium is the message' can be taken in various ways, but fundamentally

10 JNTROOUGTION

jt points to the way in which the arrival of a medjum, such as television, in our lives, can affect the way we live - not reaJJy because of the content of the messages it carries, but from the generally less noticed ways in which it causes us to rear- range our everyday lives. This is a very good insight. Media 'effects', when we are talking about media content, are notori- ously hard to measure, generally inconsequential, and mixed up with other influences. 7 But the overall 'effect' of the introduction of television - assuming that the broadcasters offer some reasonably enjoyable or informative programmes - was clearly massive in tenns of how people spent their lives.

Four hours of viewing, as an average, and every day, was an astonishing transformation in how human beings spent time, compared with the pre-television era. This is not to say that television is fuJJ of rubbish or that people are idiots for watching it. It's not impossible to find four hours of informative and entertaining things on telly. But it would be difficult to argue that this was a highly creative or sociable way for people to spend their time, or that this was not an extraordinary change in the way that human beings spent their non-working hours, compared with the preceding few thousand years.

In addition, this relatively passive orientation to time outside work was further reinforced, as mentioned above, by consumer culture. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer observed in the 1940s, and as many critics have noted since, modern capitalism succeeds not by menacing us, or dramaticaJJy crushing our will on the industrial wheel, but by encouraging us to enjoy a flow of convenient, cheer- ful stuff, purchased from shops, which gives us a feeling of satisfaction, if not happiness.8 Few of us are immune from the appeal of attractively packaged items, with the sheen and smell of newness, which help us to forget our troubles, at least for a moment.

JNTUOD UCTION 1 1)

The notion of the fetish might be useful in understanding this. The fetish has sexual connotations, but these are not (necessarily) crucial here. In Freud, a fetish is basically about unconsciously overcoming anxiety through attachment to particular objects.9 In Marx, the fetish describes the way in which we forget that the value of a commodity is a social value, and come to think of it as independent and real. 10

Somewhere between these two related ideas, we might see the fetish as the common, everyday way in which we find pleasure in the purchase of consumer goods, and acknowl- edge that it may be silly or irrational, but still a pleasure; and then consistently forget how temporary this diversion is. Between them, television and consumerism can draw people into a dully 'satisfied' reverie in which - as we will see later - it may not be especially surprising tl1at environ- mental pollution and other societal problems are generally seen as troubling, but distant, and basically 'somebody else's problem'.

TOWARDS A 'MAKING A 1 D DOING' CU L TURE.

More optimistically, however, we can see a growing engage- ment with a 'making and doing' culture. This orientation rejects the passivity of the 'sit back' model, and seeks oppor- tunities for creativity, social connections, and personal growth. In the education sphere, this approach is promoted globally by the LEGO Foundation and its various alliances - which has included some work with me - and is well ca p- tured by Guy Claxton's book, What's the Point of School?, which highlights ways in which some teachers are rejecting the 'sit back and be told' school culture described above, and instead are setting their students challenges which are much more about making and doing. 11 Students are encouraged to work together to ask questions, explore different strategies of

20 INTRODt JCTlON

investigation, and create their own solutions. This approach is open about the fact that learning is an ongoing process that everyone is engaged in - teachers themselves might show that they are engaged in a learning project, such as starting to keep bees, or learn a musical instrument. Rather than displaying laminated examples of the 'best answer' on the waJls, these classrooms show works in progress, experi- ments, even things that have gone wrong. They encourage a 'hands-on' approach to learning, and a spirit of enquiry and questioning.

In terms of the media and technologies that we use in eve- ryday Life, there has of course been a huge shift towards more interactive, internet-based tools and services. The launch of socia l media platforms such as Facebook (in 2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Instagram (in 2010) and Snapchat (in 2011), to name just a few, has led to huge amounts of interactive and - to varying degrees - creative engagement between people online. In 2017, YouTube had over I billion users, watching 5 billion videos every day, and uploading 300 hours of video every minute. 12 Instagram had 700 million users, uploading more than 100 million videos and photos every day. l3 And Facebook had reached more than 2 billion users. 14 Easy-to-use networked tools which enable people to learn about, and from, each other, and to collaborate and share resources, have made a real difference to what people do with, and can get from, their electronic media. The range of information-sharing, self-expressive and collaborative things that people do online is extraordinary. Academics, to some extent, have tended to focus on the more 'serious' uses, such as in politics and activism, but of course there are online communities about absolutely everything.

In the non-virtual world, there is a resurgence of interest in craft activities, clubs and fairs, 15 and their DIY technology equivalents involving machines and robotics, 16 as celebrated

I NTRODIICTION 21

in the mainstream Make magazine and at 'Maker Faires'. 17

Environmental concerns have encouraged people to reduce the amount of stuff they consume, and to find new ways to re-use and recycle. The Transition Towns movement has encouraged communities to work together to find sustain- able ways of bving. 18 And as we will see, the internet has played an important role in offline real-world activities, as a tool for communication, networks and organization.

DEFINING CREATIVITY

I will use the word 'creativity' - and the phrase 'everyday creativity' - quite freely in this book, in relation to the activi- ties of making which are rewarding to oneself and to others. Attempting to produce a clear-cut and simple definition of creativity can be a diverting and sometimes frustrating task, but we'll start thinking about it here and then come back to it later.

Let's start by looking at how other people define 'crea- tivity'. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is perhaps the best-known creativity researcher today. His Creativity study was based on interviews with people who were at the highest end of observed creativity - famous creative names, several of whom had won Nobel prizes for their inventions or crea- tions. This seems to put him at the old-fashioned, or at least the elite, end of the sca le, but there are perfectly good rea- sons for this. Csikszentmihalyi has pioneered a sociological approach to creativity, which is actually not at all old- fashioned or traditional: it rejects the classical notion of the creative 'genius' and instead observes how the thing we call creativity emerges from a particular supportive environment. Rather than being a Lightning-bolt of unexpected inspira- tion, he argues, creative outputs appear from individuals who have worked hard over many years to master a particular

INTRODUCTION

'symbolic domain' (physics, poetry, architecture, or what- ever) and are encouraged by other supportive individuals, groups and organizations. Csikszentmihalyi is interested in the sociological question of how these things come about - surges of creativity which make a difference to culture, sci- ence, or society. He writes:

Creativity, at least as I define it in this book, is a process by wh.ich a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines are what creativity is all about. 19

This is high-impact creativity, and importantly, it is creativ- ity which is noticed and appreciated by other people:

According to this view, creativity results from the interac- tion of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognise and validate the innovation.20

So the inventive individual is only one part of this triad. Creativity in Csikszentmihalyi's fonnulation needs a particu- lar established context in which to happen, and also needs to be recognized as something significant by other key people working in that domain. As he puts it:

Just as the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it, so creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and implement them.21

This approach to creativity sets the bar very high, of course. First you have to produce something brilliantly original, that

INTRODIT C TION

has never been seen before in the world. Then, as if that wasn't hard enough already, it has to be recognized as a bril- liantly original thing by other people. Furthem1ore, they can't be just any people, but have to be the movers and shak- ers, the well-known thought leaders, in the field where you hope to make an impact. (This makes life especially difficuJt since the established people in any particular area are typi- cally attached to their own high status, and are not necessarily likely to give a warm reception to promising newcomers.)

That's one way oflookingat creativity, and itis the right lens for Csikszentmihalyi's analysis of the social conditions which enable recognized, significant innovations to emerge. Other writers on creativity have also followed Csikszennnihalyi's definitions and approach, sometimes in a bid to illuminate 'lower level' creativity. But the lens which is helpful for asking 'How do major cultural or scientific innovations emerge?' is not necessarily the right lens for studying the much more everyday instances of creativity which concern us in this book.

After all, we do typically think of creativity as something which can happen quite routinely, whenever any of us does something in an unexpected but striking and inventive way. We don't only say that something is 'creative' when it has been recognized with a Nobel prize, nor do we limit the label to the kind of thing that each of us only does once or twice in a lifetime. Because we are inventive human beings, crea- tivity is something we do rather a lot, and understood in this broad sense it includes everyday ideas we have about how to do things, many of the things we write and produce, acts of management or self-presentation, and even, of course, witty or insightful speech.

When taken down to this everyday level, the edges of what we might ca ll creativity become ratl1er fuzzy, of course. If I managed to bake and decor.ate a birthday cake which looked like a dinosaur, for instance, I would feel really 'creative'.

INTRODU C TION

And you might agree. But if you had been told that I was a professional birthday cake-maker who had been produc- ing the same dinosaur cake for twenty years, you definitely wouldn't. Between these two poles, my creativity rating might also be affected by, say, whether or not you thought it was 'cheating' to use shop-bought sweets to represent the eyes and scales, and whether or not you suspected I'd looked at pictures of other dinosaur cakes on the internet. It's easy to get bogged down in this kind of thing. But as I said in Creative Explorations:

You could argue endlessly, if you wanted to be rather triv- ial, about whether one thing 'is' and another t11ing 'is not' creative. But that's not really the point. The point is that creativity is widely dispersed and, more importantly, is one of the most central aspects of being human. 22

Most of the research literature about creativity, however, does not really take this view. A reasonable summary is provided by Charles Lumsden, who considered a range of definitions from leading figures, and found that 'the "defini- tions" of creativity I have seen in the literature . . . carry th e unique imprint of their progenitors while suggesting some mild degree of consensus: creativity as a kind of capacity to think up something new that people find significant'.23

The trouble with this approach, though - as I'll go on to say in chapter 3 - is the strong emphasis on the end prod- uct, and the judgement of others. Creativity might be better understood as a process, and a feeling. In this way of looking at it, creativity is about breaking new ground, but internally: the sense of going somewhere, doing something, that you've not done before. This might lead to fruits which others can appreciate, but those may be secondary to the process of creativity itself, which is best identified from within.

INTROIHI C TION

Hold onto these thoughts for now. In a section at the end of chapter 3 I'll be wheeling out a gleaming new definition of creativity which hopefully overcomes these problems.

WHAT TllIS BOOK J S AND WHAT I T I S 10T

This book is a discussion about the value of everyday cre- ativity, taking in handmade physical objects and real-life experiences as well as the recent explosion of online creativ- ity. Indeed, it seeks to make connections from one sphere to the other, in the hope that we can learn about recent crea- tivity in social media by looking at what people have said about the values, ethics and benefits of more traditional craft and DIY activities, and perhaps also vice versa. This is gen- erally done through the use of some relevant theories and philosophies - quite grounded and earthy ones, nothing very abstract- and knitted, I hope, into th e reality and experience of particular creative activities.

This is not, though, a set of case studies about parti cular craftspeople, artisans, bloggers and YouTube-makers. That wasn't meant to be th e point of this book - you can get such material elsewhere, and I didn't want the discussion to be based around a sequence of meetings and anecdotes. Nor is it one of those books which weaves together autobiography with more general insight - although if you want that kind of thing, I can recommend three good books, all published since 2010: The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and H xing Things Feels Good by the philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford (published in the US with the slightly shorter title, Shop Class as Sou/craft: An lnq11iry into the Value of Work); Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in o Th1·owr1way World by Mark Frauenfelder, the Edfror-in-Chief of Make magazine; and Why We Make Things and Why it Matters: The Education

20 lNTROOUCTJON

of a Craftsnzan by woodworker Peter Kom. 24 Those three books, along with Richard Sennett's excellent The Craftsman - which I also recommend - primarily concern the values, appLied intelLigence, and feelings associated with making things by hand, as well as the need to understand how our materi al world works so that we can engage with it, fix it, or transform it.25

Tnis book is about those things too, to some extent, and includes a few autobiographical bits, but it's more about the value of making stuff more generally. In particular, it includes an emphasis on making and sharing our own media culture- I mean, via low-fi YouTube videos, eccentric biogs, quirky music and homemade websites, rather than by having to take over the traditional media of television stations and printing presses - which isn't quite 'by hand' in the lfrera l pottery-making, woodcarving sense, but which I feel is still basically a handicraft which connects us with others through its characterful, personality-imprinted, individual nature, as well as because it's a form of commw1ication.

AND TIIE REAL POI T OF THE BOOK IS ...

The other reason why the book mostly doesn't pick over lots of examples of creativity, one by one, is because I wanted to address the broader question of ''Why is everyday creativ- ity important?' Because I feel that it is incredibly important - important for society - and therefore political. And, to be frank about my motives, people don 't seem to get this. Presenting this kind of thing in front of academics who see themselves as 'critical' and 'political' scholars, I get the defi- nite feeling that they think I'm doing, at best, a sweet kind of sideshow. Whilst they struggle with 'real' issues such as government regulation of broadcasting, or something to do with political parties, I am enthusing about everyday people

lNTROOllCTION 27

making nice objects or clever little videos, which may be pleasant but is an irrelevance in terms of political or social concerns. If it's any kind of issue at all, it's a 'cultural' one: nnd who cares really if people watch silly entertainment on television or if they make their own silly entertainment; if they grow their own flowers, make tl1eir own toys or gloves, or buy them from a supermarket; or if people write their own songs, or buy someone else's.

But I think it's absolutely crucial. Even if each of the things made seems, to a grumpy observer, rather trivial. You may note that my examples just above are not the absolute essentials of life - peop le can survive without silly entertain- ment, flowers, gloves, or songs, if they have to. But it is the fact that people have made a choice - to make something themselves rather than just consume what's given by the bi g suppliers - that is significant. Amplifi ed slightly, it leads to a whole new way of looking at things, and potentially to a real political shift in how we deal with the world.

One example of how th.e idea of everyday creativ- ity can be scaled up into something significant, political, and vitally important, is the Transition movement. The Transition movement stems from the idea that - although we are likely to face really huge challenges as climate change grows, and as the oil that we rely on so much runs out - human beings are creative and can work well together to do great things. And therefore, if we think imaginatively together, and make plans and ideas for a new enjoyable way of living which doesn 't rely so much on the environ- mentally damaging things, or things we're running out of, then we might be okay. This is an approach based on optimism and creativity, and it could actually work. The movement is taking off, and you can read about it in the books The Transition Handbook and The Power of Just Doing Stuff by Rob Hopkins, and The Transition Tinieline by

20 JNTROOIJGTION

Shaun Chamberlin, or at the website, www.transitionnet work.org.26

The Transition movement fs a great illustration of what I'm talking about, then, but so is the less obviously 'political' content of online video and craft sites, and everyday home- made events, untrained attempts at art, humble efforts to make a knitted owl with solar-powered eyes, and anything else where people are rejecting the givens and are making thefr world anew. This helps us to build resilience - one of the key Transition words - and the creative capacity to deal with significant challenges.

OUTLINE OF TIIE BOOK

The book begins by forgetting about the internet at first, and exploring some philosophical, poJjtical and practical explanations of the human drive to make things. In chapter 2 this is mostly centred around two Victorian makers and thinkers, John Ruskin and William Morris. In chapter 3, we look at more recent craft and DIY ideas, activities, and moti- vations. By chapter 4, we arrive at the internet again, and consider 'making is connecting' in online environments. In chapter 5 we turn to the value of having social connections, and collaborative projects, in everyday life, and chapter 6 is about having tools for creative expression and making a difference, and features quite a bit of the philosopher Ivan Illich. Chapter 7 considers some of the critiques of social media systems, and finds reason to disagree with some, but concur with others. Chapter 8 is about the creative process, taking music as a starting-point, and chapter 9 also starts with music as a way to look at do-it-yourself processes and ways to get creative work out there. In chapter 10 we con- sider the principles that underpin effective 'platforms for creativity'. Finally, chapter 11 pulls things together in a con-

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dusion, where we set out seven key principles of 'making is c:onnecting', and offer some positive ideas about developing and connecting creativity.

This book hns a website at http:llwww:mnkingisco11necti11g.org. The site includes videos, additional material,

relevant links, a11d other inform11tio11. See also David Gauntlett's main site at www.davidgnuntlett.com.