Making is Connecting

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

David Gauntlett

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509513512
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

SECOND UPDATED EDITION, WITH THREE ALL-NEW CHAPTERS

The first edition of Making is Connecting struck a chord with crafters, YouTubers, makers, music producers, artists and coders alike. David Gauntlett argues that through making things, people engage with the world and create connections with each other. Online and offline, we see that people want to make their mark, and to make connections.

This shift from a 'sit-back-and-be-told culture' to a 'making-and-doing culture' means that a vast array of people are exchanging their own ideas, videos, and other creative material online, as well as engaging in real-world crafts, music projects, and hands-on experiences. Drawing on evidence from psychology, politics, philosophy, and economics, Gauntlett shows that this everyday creative engagement is necessary and essential for the happiness and survival of modern societies.

This fully revised second edition includes many new sections as well as three brand new chapters on creative processes, do-it-yourself strategies, and platforms for creativity.

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 thinking 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 all kinds of activities in everyday life.

I hope to pull some of these things together, in ways which are hopefully not too obvious as we start. You may reasonably 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 particular, 120 years early. We will note how the former Catholic priest and radical philosopher Ivan Illich outlined the necessary 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 gardening 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.

MAKING IS CONNECTING

This brings us to the title of the book: ‘Making is connecting’. 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.

THREE REASONS 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 professional 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 imaginative, 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 easily, making connections with others, was unprecedented in both character 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 mentioned in the first point, I was meant to be doing research about what people did, and why, but had always been uncomfortable 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 thoughtful, 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 Explorations.¹ In these studies 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 communicate 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 something, using the hands, gave people the opportunity 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.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS AN IDEA AND A METAPHOR

This book does not suppose that creative activities have suddenly appeared in the story of human life because someone invented the internet. However, the internet – in particular through the 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 collaboratively make interesting, informative and entertaining cultural spaces. This process has been boosted by the emergence of social media. In the first edition of this book, I talked about ‘Web 2.0’, which was what we called it then, although I had to explain that ‘Web 2.0’ was not a particular kind of technology, 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 separate gardens. So for example the NASA website was one garden, and my Theory.org.uk website was another 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 content, but basically they were separate, with a fence between each one. There’s nothing wrong with this model, as such; it works perfectly well as a platform for all kinds of individuals, groups, or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Preamble to the second edition
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The meaning of making I: Philosophies of craft
• 3 The meaning of making II: Craft today
• 4 The meaning of making III: Digital
• 5 The value of connecting: Personal happiness and social capital
• 6 Tools for change
• 7 Online creativity needs better platforms
• 8 Making connections and the creative process: From music to everything
• 9 Doing it yourself: More lessons from music making and connecting
• 10 Platforms for creativity
• 11 Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement