[Noisebridge-discuss] Grad student survey request

[jim]

   i don't get it. 

   seems to me the spirit of people in former times 
with respect to sewing and welding and carpentering 
and fixing their cars and so forth was a matter of 
doing or doing without, i.e. the spirit of being 
resentful and tired at having to stay up late to 
fix the tractor. 
   i don't know how to think about technology and 
big box stores occuring in the same sentence. 
   i think there's great significance to the 
difference between having to fix or make something 
in order to survive (i.e. carry on with life's 
chores) and wanting to repurpose something to be 
something other because one has the free time and 
resources to be able to do so; there is the idea 
that technology has reached some kind of tipping 
point in that common, inexpensive items contain 
various subsystems that can be re-purposed. 
   it seems to me that a certain amount of 
education and/or exposure to ideas matters in 
people's abilities to do such re-purposing. 

   what is the deal with "big box stores" in your 
mind? they are derived from the same marketing 
principles that brought us fast food and highly 
restricted forms of music and other products that 
are branded and delivered ubiquitously to leverage 
economies of manufacturing scale and reduced costs 
of goods. what ever do big box stores have to do 
with hacking-making-do-it-yourself? 
   there've always been a big lot of people who 
have done nothing for themselves: slaves and in 
later times laborers who worked each day to 
exhaustion just to make food and rent (mark twain 
noted that abolition had its advantages that the 
wealthy no longer had to take care of the daily 
needs of their workers). 
   people attracted to noisebridge seem to be 
intelligent, curious, educated in some way or 
another, and with time enough to exercise their 
interests--having the time is quite important, 
it may derive from being unemployed or from 
refusing to work at an uninteresting job or from 
still being in school or being young enough or 
old enough or alternatively inclined enough to 
have nothing else to do but look for a fun==
satisfying way to put in time until we're put 
into the earth. 

   i think you've got romanticized ideas about 
this stuff and you should get rid of them so 
you can see clearly. there are a lot of people 
doing this stuff, each with idiosyncratic 
motives. you gotta talk to a fair number of 
them before you can start to see patterns, much 
less craft surveys to ferret out the dynamics. 



On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 18:12 -0700, Kyla Wagman wrote:
> This is an interesting point.  I probably shouldn't capitalize the
> maker movement since I don't know of any previous time where one was
> prevalent.  I'm more referring to the spirit that was around the time
> when people weren't reliant on technology/big box stores/etc... and
> could do and make things on their own.  I don't know if there's
> significance in the fact that people had to instead of wanted to make
> for themselves. Does that make sense?  
> 
> I think it's fair to say that the influx in technology, big box
> stores, and manufacturers over the decades has made people (in
> general), reliant on it/them. And so they do less for themselves than
> they did before.  Fair?  The DIY spirit has been a growing trend over
> the past years - and this renewed interest in DIY has shed light onto
> the likes of you all who never really lost that DIY spirit.  Some
> argue the trend towards DIY is a result of the recession, some would
> say it's a generational response.  I don't know what I think yet,
> still figuring that out.  But what's interesting about you all, is
> that the spirit is really intrinsic to yourselves.  I talked to
> someone who said, you either have it or you don't.  You aren't
> tinkering/hacking/making as a result of some bigger factor - you've
> just always done it or been interested in it.  Do you guys agree with
> that? 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Jesse Zbikowski
> <embeddedlinuxguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>         On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Kyla Wagman <wagmank at vcu.edu>
>         wrote:
>         > I'm working on a project about the resurgence of the Maker
>         Movement
>         
>         
>         I'm interested in the idea of a "resurgence"; was there a
>         historical
>         Maker Movement which the current one is recapitulating?
>         
>         For that matter when did "maker" become a term applied to a
>         human
>         being, as opposed to a coffee maker or bread maker? It's never
>         really
>         scanned properly to me.
> 
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