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2 THE MEANING OF MAKING I: PHILOSOPHIES OF CRAFT"

This chapter focuses on the offline and non-digital world of people making things for themselves and others. Craft might suggest how carefully the work works Also the term craft might be associated with traditional rather twee items, or a newer, cool approach to making things yourself, as seen in the recent rise of knitting, 'craft guerila' fairs, DIY culture and other trendy craft activities. The term craft is complicated by its relationship with 'art'. UNFAIR VIEW on 'art' and 'craft'. ART tends to mean the truly creative transformation of ideas and emotions into visual objects. Craft (ends up) indicating the less prestigious production of carving or pots, by less creative people who just like making. Here are some philosophers with their vision of making, thinking, crafting, blending, combine or fuse these subjects. Peter Dormer, Richard Sennet and Allen Dissanayake shair in sort of way the same vision about creativity. These ideas show that creativity is a daily thing. In there own way they were saying “making is connecting”.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx wrote about the alienating effect of machine-work upon the worker “from being a man becomes an abstractive activity and a belly”.

Ruskin

For Ruskin work was vital in terms that we are moral and spiritual, connecting 'man' with nature and with God. His point of view is about celebration of the human creativity and craft, the moral comparative that this should be freely expressed, individual and unconstrained.

Marx's

Marx significance was social and economic, his analysis was, same as Ruskin's a critique of slavery. Marx has a plan to for how to fix this – the revolution which would replace the present system with a communist one.

William Morris

Morris believed individual self-expression is so vital that if a society creates supposedly rational systems which do not allow a voice to people's individual creativity, then the whole system rapidly becomes sick and degraded. He developed this emphasis on individual creative expression into a moren expansive vision of happy, empowered creative communities. Unlike Ruskin, Morris was a well-organized entrepreneur and even a multitasker, who didn't waste any time in creating a successful business in response to his need.

Theodor Adorno

He passionately believes that people deserve better, but on the other hand, he just seems disgusted to observe that almost everybody is a moron.

"3 THE MEANING OF MAKING II: CRAFT TODAY"

This chapter is about considering some of today's popular craft practices, and the recent 'rise' of craft. It’s also about why people in the present day still like to make things themselves. And about discussing the meaning of creativity and proposing a new definition of creativity which seems better suited to our purposes. The word 'craft' is recently new. Craft can seem like a timeless practice rooted in ancient, traditional ways of engaging with the world nd building communities.

18th century

Craft referred primarily to political cuning and a sly, jocular tricksy approach to social issues. Samual Johnson's Dictionary of the Englisch Language (1755) Craft: 'art; trade' – 'art; ability; dexterity' –'fraud; cunning; artifice' Craft was not associated with any particular methodes or objects and could be applied to any cultural practices.

19th century

The notion of 'Craft' or 'craftmenship' appeared even less often, remaing pretty dormant until the last quarter of that century, when it sprang into action.

Paul Greenhalgh

Former Head of Research at Victoria and Albert Museum says that there are three kinds off craft. He describes them as 'decorative art, vernacular, and the politics of work.

The Arts & Crafts Movement

The combination of these three threads led to the A&C movement: a loose group of idealistic thinkers and craftspeople build on the ideas of Ruskin & Morris in different ways. All creative work was of equal status, and was the means by which human beings could connect with nature, with their own sense of self, and with other people. The phrase 'Arts & Crafts' first used in this context in 1887. The movement rooted in Victorian Brittain but was most notably in the USA were it connected with American notions of self-reliance, individualism, community and romantic connection with nature. Greenhalgh: The A&C movement can be seen to be the most successful construction of a theory and practice of ethical art. The larger ideal pulled the three threads into proximity. Humanity would be liberated through communal creativity! It is something very much like this vision which inspires contemporary craft enthusiast today, as well as exponents of web 2.0 and online creativity. Although rooted in a seemingly distant age, it's message is practical, positive and ethical. Greenhalgh: Ultimately, for craft pioneers, the movement was centred on physical and mental freedom. By uniting the workprocess directly to demand for a higher quality of life, they had regenerated the idea that craft was synonymous with power. The American inheritors of the A&C movement added the democratic element which todat we would call DIY culture. Dehumanizing industrial methodes were rejected because of a concern for the individual worker, but the arts and crafts alternative led to beautiful handmade products that the typical worker could not afford. This terrible paradox is immediately dissolved in the simple phrase: DO IT YOURSELF. Gustav Stickley, a furniture maker, craftsman and achitect bases in New York. From 1901 to 1916 he published a magazine called The Craftsman. He believed in a simple, democratic art, that would provide Americans with 'material' surroundings conducive to plain living and high thinking. He revived the concepts of 'open source': a system in which developers today share unprotected code in the belief that others should be freely able to use it and improve it. William Morris made things to a very high standard, because that gave him pleasure, and he thought that the care a quality of their production would bring pleasure to others. Het didn't make things to a very high standart because he thought he was better that everybody else. DIY is therefore part of the original A&Cmessage – but processed through American optimism, and communicated in a cheerfull and unpretentious way.

DIY Culture

DIY today is associated with everyday home improvement. This is a common suburban kind of phenomenon, popularly seen as a bit of boring and nothing to do with any kind of political movement. When DIY emerged in 1960, it was. In particular, it was argued that the formal education system had filled students heads with abstract information, supposedly of some background value for those who might enter the professions, but lacking real-world usefulness.

PUNK DIY

This DIY culture is characterized by a rejection of the glossy, highly produced, celebrity-oriented mainstream of popular culture, and its replacement with a knowingly non- glossy, often messily produced alternative which is much less bothered about physical beauty, and declares an emphasis on content rather than style.

VRAGEN:

1. What are Ruskins and Morris ideas on creativity and what where they reacting on? Ruskin’s visie over creativiteit: Begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing. And this might leasd to roughness, failure, and shame, but also unleashes ‘the whole majesty’ of the individual. (blz 29, 30)

Ruskin’s geeft kritiek: op de industrialisatie omdat de creativiteit van de mens verdwijnd doordat ze een radar worden in een machine (fabriek). Hij wordt gezien al seen concervatieve socialist die op komt voor de arbeider (de arbeider is voortgekomen uit de industrialisatie ) Hij is tegen het capitalisme wat uitbuiting met zich meebrengt. Ruskin, gaat over de kwaliteit van het leven (Vrijheid gaat verloren door de industrialisatie) Morris, gaat over de kwaliteit van de ambacht. (Ambacht gaat verloren door de industrialisatie)

2. What exactly are the ideas of the arts and crafts movement and what are the ideas of that movement and where they similar to the ideas of Ruskin? A & C was een beweging tegen de mechanisatie en de massa productie van de industriele revolutie. Met deze beweging wilden ze de romantiek en ambacht uit de middeleeuwen terug brengen. Daarnaast was deze beweging voor verbetering van levensomstandigheden van de werkers, en hebben ze gezorgd voor pensioenen. Dit sloot aan bij de ideen van Ruskin over de kwaliteit van het leven en dus de levensomstandigheden.

3. What is DIY and where does it overlap or differ from arts and crafs? A&C maakt een sociaal politiek statement en zet zich in voor verbetering van kwalitieit van levensomgeving, DIY is ook gericht op verbeterde kwalitiet van het leven maar veel individueler en meer gericht op de persoonlijke gelukservaring van het maken zelf.

4. Punk DIY what is that and what are the differences between DIY and Punk DIY? (blz. 45) Aan de ene kant heb je de hoge kwaliteit glossy DIY producten. Punk DIY manifesteerd zich zonder waarde te hechten aan de estetische schoonheid of kwaliteit van producten en maken hiermee een statement tegen de perfectie. Ze zetten zich af tegen de mainstream (DIY) en algemene schoonheid. Het gaat meer om individuele smaak en uiting van creativiteit.

5. What are the similarities and differences that Carl Marx have and Ruskin about industrialization? This chapter continues to follow the development of thinking about craft activity and making things. We will look briefly at how the ideas of Ruskin and Morris fed into the Arts and Crafts movement, and an ethos which would appear later in the twentieth century as ‘DIY culture’. Look at why people in the present day still like to make things themselves and we will return to the discussion of the meaning of creativity. Blz 45

Craft can seem like a timeless practice, rooted in ancient and traditional ways of engaging with the world and building communities. The word ‘craft’ itself is relatively new. In the eighteenth century, ‘craft’ referred primarily to political cunning and a sly, jocular, tricksy approach to social issues.

Betekenis van craft in 1755:

Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, ‘manual art; trade’ is listed as one of the meanings, along with ‘art; ability; dexterity’, alongside the earlier usage as ‘fraud; cunning; artifi ce’.2 blz

==Betekins volgens Paul Greenhalgh== ( a former head of research at the Victoria an albert museum): The ideological and intellectual underpinning of the craft constituency is not a consistent whole, but has several distinct threads to it, which have only become intertwined relatively recently. It is these threads, or elements, that I will deal with here. There are three. I will describe them as decorative art , the *vernacular , and the politics of work .5

• untrained design, this language is close to the one who made it. Unskilled. Er is nog geen kennis over maar er wordt toch wat gemaakt. Zonder handboek of kennis. Het kan van de persoon komen of van de techniek of materiaal.

The first of these, decorative art, is a broad term which seems to encompass all the ‘applied’ forms of creativity which have in common the bruised, second-class feeling of being excluded from the category of ‘fine art’. blz 46

The political message of Ruskin and Morris, that creative workers must be free to express themselves through the production of whole objects.

It was the combination of these three threads that led to the Arts and Crafts movement. All creative work was of equal status, and was the means by which human beings could connect with nature, with their own sense of self, and with other people. The phrase ‘Arts and Crafts’ was first used in this context in 1887, and the movement burned brightly until the First World War. Blz. 47

Greenhalgh its message is practical, positive, and ethical. As Greenhalgh goes on to say:

The Arts and Crafts movement, in retrospect, can be seen to be the most successful construction of a theory and

practice of ethical art. . . . The vernacular was the model, unalienated work was the means and art was the goal. The larger ideal pulled the three elements into proximity. It was a brilliant formulation: humankind would be liberated through communal creativity.7 : It is something very much like this vision which inspires contemporary craft enthusiasts today as well as exponents of Web 2.0 and online creativity.

THE MEANING OF MAKING III: DIGITAL"

The practice of craft – the thoughtful process of making something with the hands. Making something to share online can also be seen as craft because you start with nothing accept some tools or materials, there is no prescription and there are infinite possibilities.

YOUTUBE AS ARCHETYPE OF THE DIGITAL CREATIVE PLATFORM

Web 2.0 applications encourage people to make and share things. These platforms tend not to assert a preference for particular topics or styles of material. Rather, they encourage users to express their creativity in whatever way they choose – within a particular framework, and general type of content.

Youtube is an archetypal digital creative platform in three key ways. 1: A framework for participation. 2: Agnostic about content. 3: Fostering community. You go on youtube as a free choice, but there is a exploitable surplus. But off course Youtube thanks its popularity because of amateur contributions. Virginia Nightingale She thinks that companies that own online platforms act as the 'patrons' of collective creative activity, retaining some power and control but also welcoming the imaginative work of users.

2: Agnostic about content. Youtube is entirely agnostic about what contributions can be made, apart for pornographic and potentially offensive or abusive material. The platform is presented, but the opportunities for innovation in content are left open to the users. Contributors have different motivations such as aspiration to enter mainstream media getting attention from the traditional industrie post examples of their professional practice to attract clients personal relationships Patricia Lange called those personal videos: 'videos of affinity'. These kind of video's can seem trivial to those who expect online video to aspire to 'TV standard' productions.

3: Fostering community. Youtube is more than a videoarchive, it's a community. “Broadcast yourself” replaced the original, less engaging slogan: “Your Digital Video Repository”. This new slogan point to the outward-facing, and possibly autobiographical, nature of the anticipated videos, but Youtube's functionality encourages much more than mere individualized 'look at me' self exhibition. Youtube encourages user to
– Make comments
– subscribe
– add friends
– give star ratings
– send messages
– make video's responding to other video's Members who become youtube stars have become so by embracing the community and acting as a community member themselves. Marina Orlova: Hot for Work. Michael Buckley: What the Buck?! A big contrast with these exampes is Oprah Winfrey's foray into youtube. Her production company chose to disable certain participatory functions. These actions provoked an intense and immediate flurry of protest video's and discussion. The most damning was that Oprah herself didn't participate or engaged with the Youtube-community.


Motivations for making and sharing online: Facebook the amount of effort is low, and the social rewards and connections make it worthwhile. Facebook only requires simple and momentary inputs and in return you get to be part of an active social network, where people might make comments on your stuff, and you can comment on theirs, leading to a sence of mutual engagement and community, as well as an opportunity to try to impress like-minded people with you interest and activities. This regular, easy sharing of everyday personal stuff cultivates what Leisa Reichelt has called 'Ambient intimacy': Ambient intimacy is being able to keep in touch with people with a lever of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have acces to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.

Amanda Blake Soule: Craftcentred and creative-parentingblog. SouleMama “This blog is a mediation of sorts. It's one of the ways in which I remind myself of the joys, the beauty and the blessings around me each and every day. Writing about them helps me hold onto those moments. personal need to write way of preserving memories create futher opportunities desire to communicate hope to inspire others (especially parents) “It's a ridiculous joyaddiction that feeds itself. I write for me, but I hit “publish” each day in the hopes that somehow – someway – these little ramblings of mine could aspire you to look for, to follow, to perhaps even create a moment of joy and beauty in your own day.” Motivations for twitter (out of a self selected group of personal followers) “why you make stuff and share online?”
- so others can learn or be entertained
- A desire to share thoughts and creative endeavors
- to chronicle my existence
- to add to the information available on the web
- to be an active participant in the discussion of things
- to be a media maker and nog just a consumer
- self-promotion / show off
- to get feedback
- as a way to collaborate 
- contributing to and being part of a community of peers and friends
- a sense of being heard These responses suggest people create online content to feel active and recognized within a community of interesting people, to express or display aspects of themselves and their interests Its not only about making and connecting. The theme of recognition is a little stronger than anticipated. People want to lay down signs of their existensce and their ideas and they want this to be noticed. The 'sharing' and 'connecting' themes sounds both warm, seeking recognition is not necessarily very difficult, but it includes a harder edge, kind of a demand: 'Notice me!' Studying Bloggers 'Who blogs? Personality perdictors of blogging' journal article by Rosanna Guardagno (and colleagues) Universaty of Alabama's psychology department, which uses a personality invertory questionaire to see what kind of person a blogger is. This kind of research doesn't foster deep understanding because the survey is only amongst graduate students. Study was done in two parts with a total of 367 students, two-third female. 66 of these students reported writing a blog. Bigfive model of personality based on individuals vary on five key dimensions: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness. People who score high on openness and women who score high on neuroticism were more likely to be bloggers. It is nog surprising, given that the characteristics of a individuals with high in opennes including imagination, creativity, curiosity, artistic talent, intelligence and diversity in interests are more likely to be(come) bloggers. Blogging is good for imaginative, creative people who want to make connections. Two Japanese bloggers, Asako Miura and Kiymi Yamashita sent e-mails to all registered users of Hatena Diary, a free blog service. They recieved 1142 usable responses. Two-third of the bloggers were male, most were in their twenties or thirties. The study found that the strongest reason for continuing to write a blog was positive response from other poeple, which had a positive effect on all kinds of satisfaction. This suggest that positive feedback from readers, for example sympathy, support, or encouragement, worked as a strong emotional social support on the behavior of publishing a personal blog and motivated a person to continue to be an athor. Positive comments could outweigh nasty ones. Satisfaction from being accepted by others had the strongest effect on the intention to continue writing a blog. This might suggest that there us additional significance in blogwriting for authors beyond the merely personal act of diary writing. This does not simply mean that they yearn for friendliness and praise, but rather that making things and sharing them online is a process which also creates networks of emotional support and significant social bonds. David Brake Interviewed 23 authors of personal blogs. He wrote that these blogs make up about 70% of all blogs. The interviewed blogger all live in or near London. Het interviewed them face to face and selected them for diversity to research a range of different kinds of people who happened to blog. His PhD thesis is full of details, he summerized why it is that people go to the effort of producing a blog. “ Based on my research, I would say that people who write this personal blogs have broadly speaking five motivations: Maintain their blogs to narrowcast their doings to friends an acquintances, not realy seeking to enter a dialogue with them. Maintain a dialogue with friends – what they write may be visible to others, but those others are not the target audience and the bloggers may be at best different, and at worst hostile, to their unintended readers. Treat their personal blogs as PR or journalistic tools, reaching out to an imagined audience that they wish to impress to advance in their careers, but not seeking personal connection. Genuinely want to be read by people who they have not met and are not intending to meet – and some of these don't even want to be read by their friends and families. (Most intreguingly) those whose blogging practice appears to be 'self-directed' people who blog because they want to master a new tool or because they want to be heard – but at a very tenuous leverl – or because they want to vent frustrations. Brake's blogger primarily wanted to communicate, to connect or just wanted to create and share. Incidentally, none of them, experienced blogging als hard work. Productive enthusiasts Nancy Baym and Robert Burnett Partly people make things and share them because they want to – the process of making the thing, and knowing that others may encounter it, brings it own pleasures. Partly it is to connect and communicate with others, be an active participant in online dialogues and communities, giving and receiving ideas, feedback and support. And partly to express, wish to be noticed, recognized and heard. Crafters online, like crafters offline, like to be able to make and manage a whole thing, seeing it develop forms first idea through to completion. These motives, qualities and desires ar timeless but the internet provides a platform for sharing and exchange, with unique proporties of accessability and reach. For centuries people have liked to make thing, and share them with others, in order to communicate, be part of a conversation, and to recieve support or recognition, but the internet has given us a forum where people can do this without gatekeepers, without geographical restrictions and in an organized way that mmeans we can find like-minded people easily – so that we can share ideas and enthusiasm with people who actually care about the things that we care about, and are likely to have meaningful, informed responses.