User:Dennsiinthenight /Making is connecting

"2 THE MEANING OF MAKING I: PHILOSOPHIES OF CRAFT"

This chapter mainly focusses on the offline, non-digital world of people making things. For themselves and others.

Craft might suggest, the carefull work, a skilled practice of making beautiful objects.

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 truely creative transformation of ideas and emotions into visual objects. Craft (ends up) idicating the less prestigious production of carving or pots, by less creative people who just like making.

Peter Dormer:

The separation of craft from art and design is one of the phenomena of late-twentieth-century Western culture. The consequences of this split have been quite startling. It has led to the separation of ‘having ideas’ from ‘making objects’. It has also led to the idea that there exists some sort of mental attribute known as ‘creativity’ that precedes or can be divorced from a knowledge of how to make things.

The urgent need to make, for the sake of the pleasure and understanding gained within the process of making itself, is why craft has been able to survive and perhaps become stronger, in spite of its detachment from so-called fine art. “Enough people have wanted to go on making things. Enough people believe they can expand their ideas and knowledge about the world through learning and practicing a craft. Some people believe that if you want to truly under- stand a thing you have to make a version of that thing – a model, representation, or piece of mimetic art.”

Richard Sennet:

Thinking and making are aspects of one inufied process. Book: The Craftsman: helped the status of craft the recent years. “The craftsperson does not do the thinking and then move on to the mechanical act of making, on the contrary. Making is part of thinking, and thinking and feeling is part of making. Craft is a unity of body and mind. Working with the hands as a central part of the process of thinking and making. Craft as exploration, a process of 'problem solving and problem finding'. Craft becomes a process of making personal self-identity and citizenship.

Allen Dissanayake:

There is an inherent pleasure in making. We might call this joie de faire (like joie de vivre) to indicate that there is something important, even urgent, to be said about the sheer enjoyment of making something exist that didn’t exist before, of using one’s own agency, dexterity, feelings and judgment to mold, form, touch, hold and craft physical materials, apart from anticipating the fact of its eventual beauty, uniqueness or usefulness.

The inherent satisfaction of making; the sense of being alive within the process, and the engagement with ideas, learning, and knowledge which come not before or after, but within te practice of making. Craft is about a drive to make an share things, no matter what anyone says.

Peter Dormer:

Making – craft, skill, and the realisation of an object through craft labour – is not a trivial issue for craftspeople. Making is both the means through which the craftsperson explores their obsession or idea and an end in itself.

Making and connecting is not an option, it is experienced as a necessity. It seems vital, contemporary and woven into a vision of craft – a connection between humans and handmade onjects and nature.

The notion of 'craft' seems timeless but is actually quite new. It began with Victorian thinkers, William Morris and John Ruskin, who hated the Victorian times. There ideas about creativity as part of everyday life, and as a binding force in fellowship (community) has much to offer today. In there own way they were saying “making is connecting”.

John Ruskin

Born in 1819 published The Stones of Venice 1853 Extremely profilic. Artist and art critic social thinker poet and fictionwriter writer about architecture, geology, literature, science and invironment. Had critique and interesting ideas about art and society and the dehumanized model of industial production. For Ruskin the thought and craft of making, the mental and the physical, are united in the same process.

Ruskin's opposition to industrialism, and exploitative capitalism, and care for the common worker, would today make him a left-wing socialist. However he is also described as a conservative man.

A Ruskin kind of conservatism, which yearns for the (rather distant and idealized) past because of an attachment to the values of communities, local-level organic production, care for the environment, and valuing all workers rather than treating them as parts in a machine, all sounds quite radical and progressive to modern ears – or it does if you see them as a programme for the future, rather than just the mourning of a lost past.

Unto This Last: set of four essays published as a book in 1862. It's about Ruskins ideas to form a powerful moral critique of laissez-faire economics – the newly established orthodoxy whih maintained that unimpeded induvidial self-interest should be the driving force of social and economic orgnization.

Ruskins ideology (moral and romantic instincts) would not allow any system where life was abused and exploited for any purpose. Ruskin was also making a rigorous, rational argument against the claims of the economists to have established a ‘scientific’ approach to the cultivation of wealth. The aim of developing a perfect economic system where material concerns are detached from moral ones, and where individual interests are detached from social context, was intellectually wrong as well as morally empty, he argued.

Near the end of Unto This Last: “THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.”

For Ruskin financial wealth which does not contribute to the stock of human happyness is no wealth at all. Unto This Last seemed to Victorian Society a rather shocking and misguided outburst from one of its most celebrated art critics – why was he suddenly upsetting the establishment with these radical ideas?

Ruskin's social-political views are well grounded in his previous writings on art and architecture, and stem from an emphasis on the primacy of human creativity. His insight and lucidy eappeared eight years before Unto This Last in an essay entitled “The Nature of Gothic”, the sixth chapter of the second volume of “The Stones of Venice” a three-volume discussion of Gothic architecture. He focusses on the defining characteristics of Gothic architecture, specifying why it is special. He admires the 'savagery' and 'rudeness' of the Gothic style because he sees it as the loving embrace of humanity's imperfections. The craftspeople who contribute to a Gothic building put in thoughtful work, even though it is imperfect. To force a craftsperson to make things to fixed specifications – with absolute precision by line and rule – was to make them a slave. In this Gothic style this slavery is done away with altogether, christianity having recognised, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul. Ruskin welcomes the collaborative mish-mash, the combined construction of individual quirks and talents, a celebration of imperfection, imagination and 'do what you can'. ‘Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame.’He sets this fine spirit of noble and creative imperfection against the ignoble desire to see the ‘narrow accomplishment’ of supposedly ‘perfect’ work done to a readymade pattern. This brings out the moral choice to be made: ‘You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.’A human being can be forced to work as a ‘tool’, following the precise instructions of their masters, making things correctly, but they are dehumanized and their spirit is gagged. Or they can be allowed to ‘begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing’ – and this might lead to roughness, failure, and shame, but also unleashes ‘the whole majesty’ of the individual.

Adam Smith:

(treatise / Assay) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He praised the process of the contrast between medieval craftmanship and Victorian industrialism in the first sentence of his book: 'the greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour'. Later in the same work he worried (like Ruskin) that the worker 'has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

Karl Marx

– 1844: He wrote privatly about the alienating effect of machine-work upon the worker. – published: 'Capital' in 1867 in which he argumented that the devision of labour led to alienation. Just as he is thus depressed spiritually and physically to the conditions of a machine, and from being a man becomes an abstractive activity and a belly.

Both Ruskin and Marx employ the notion that the male worker who is reduced to repetitive machine-work ceases to be ‘a man’. But there are interesting differences in how the two thinkers make their similar argument. For Ruskin, the primary crime of the industrial system is that it steals from the worker the opportunity to create a whole object and to put his own creative mark upon it. Marx’s critique is motivated by similar concerns, but the master economist uses somewhat different language and emphases; Marx’s wageslave worker (loon “slaaf” arbeider) is for Ruskin a creative spirit whose voice has been stolen. Ruskin: It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. Ruskin anticipated an objection from his reader: if worker is a great artist but unable to express himself, due to the devision of labor, he should be made a 'gentleman' encouraged to produce beautiful designs which could be axecuted by the common worker. But these ideas are founded on two mistaken suppositions: that one man's thoughts can be executed by another man's hands and that manual labour is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect.

Ruskin is against the seperation of these two: One man to be always thinking an another man to be always working. The workman ought often to be thinking and the thinker to be working. Both should be gentleman, in the best sense.

According to Peter Anthony's obeservations: 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 omperative that this should be freely expressed, individual and unconstrained. Ruskins lament (klaaglied) can certainly seem unrealistically nostalgic – for he wishes we should simply elevate all workers to be gentlemen. Ruskin did not offer a simple manifesto for change, his great contribution was to establish individual autonomous creativity as a core value which society must nurture, not crush, if it is to retain any moral authority, or quality of life.

Marx's significanse 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

Born in 1834 Impressed by 'The stones of Venice' Undergraduate Oxford 1853 Republished Ruskin's 'The Nature of Gothic' in a book. He wrote in the preface: In future days this chapter will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century. Mastered all kinds of skills: Painting, drawing, embroidering, woodcutting, calligraphy, bookprinting, tapestry weaving, textile printing. 1861: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co was founded; Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture and the Metals’ – producing handcrafted objects, wallpaper, and textiles for the home, as well as major commissions. 1891: Morris founded 'Kelmscott Press' which used the approach printing techniques of 400 years earlier.

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.

Morris was embroiled in medieval fantasies from an early age, when he became a man, medievalism took a more developed meaning. E.P. Thomson writes about Morris: For Morris, the most important result of the new scholar- ship was in the reconstruction of a picture of the Middle Ages, neither as a grotesque nor as a faery world, but as a real community of human beings – an organic pre-capitalist community with values and an art of its own, sharply contrasted with those of Victorian England. Ruskin was more of an amateur artist as wel as art critic, Morris combined theory and practice more comprehensively. Like Ruskin, Morris felt that workers should be able to experience pleasure form making beautiful thing from the finest materials.

Unlike Ruskin, Morris was a well-organized entrepreneur and avid multitasker, who didn't waste any time in creating a succesful business in response to his need.

TIME-TRAVELLERS FROM THE FUTURE

Morris was dedicated to the production of high-prized luxery objects, using the lavishly decorated Kelmscott Press books, very high productioncosts which meant they were only available for the elite.

Morris: 'We should have a library on every streetcorner, where everybody should read all the best books, printed in te best and most beautiful type. However he did never seek to begin a 'books for all' publishing revolution.

Allan Lane later made affordable Penguin paperback.

Tony Pinkney: From this standpoint, then, the Kelmscott Press books, however expensive and restricted in social circulation in their own day, are not evidences of medievalist nostalgia and political withdrawal, but are rather time-travellers from some far future we can barely imagine, showing how lov- ingly artefacts might be crafted in the socialist world that is to come.

Two sides of Morris battle: First: to prompt a transformation of society. Second: to modify and disrupt things, in the here and now, by inserting finely produced material objects. And ethical working practices, into a society accustomed to 'shoddy' products and exploitative factories.

Clive Wilmer

Editor of the Penguin Classics selection of Morris's work. 'News From Nowhere and Other Writing. defents Morris work, on his behalf by explaining that ‘the creation of beautiful furnishings and so on is part of a process of public education, providing a model of good production methods and pioneering a return to higher standards of design’. The expensive Kelmscott Press books are therefore consistent with Morris’s ‘all-or-nothing politics’ – he would rather show the world the true ideal book, rather than compromise with more affordable models of lower quality.

William Morris wasn't just a man who ran a craft business, and who also happend to be a write of poetry and novels, and who also found time to produce political critiques and pamphlets. He was a man who projected a vision – a vision of great fundamental hope and optimism – through a striking number of different channels.

As Clive Wilmer puts it, Morris is reminding us of the possibility of alternatives: 'To dream of the impossible and disregard reality is to question the inevitability of excisting circumstances.

Theodor Adorno

He was a Marxist, unable to believe that people would be so stupid as to apparently enjoy the appalling sentimental offerings of the popular culture industry. He passionately believes that people deserve better, but on the other hand, he just seems disgusted to observe that almost everybody is a moron. William Morris takes a kinder approacht to everyday life, recognizing that people have to ‘make do’ within a system wich is not their choosing. Like Adorno, Morris feared that industrial capitalism diverted people’s desires away from the natural love of nature, creativity, and fresh air into “sham wants” which could more easily satisfy. Instead of telling them how dumb their lives are, he offers stories, manifestos, songs, and objects from a better future, to feed the positive aspirations which he believes still reside in human hearts. Morris’s strenghts is he is unwilling to give up hope. By ‘hope he meant al that gives worth. Morris was well ahead of his time on the environment and sustainability. Sustainable relationship with nature would be essential for the continued survival of humanity. He observed that science had become a servant of the capitalist system. For Morris, the sharing of art in a community was one of the fundamentals, part of a society’s life-blood. “I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few” He knows that working as a slave to the capitalist system, wit hno control over one’s tasks and no freedom ofpersonal expression, offers no fullfilment at all. Morris explains that creative work offers ‘hope’ in three ways. Hope of rest te pleasureable buzz of a job well done, as one comes to relax of having made something worthwhile. And third, ‘hope of pleasure in the work itself’ a conscious pleasure in the activity.

Morris acknowledges that this joyful celebration of work may seem ‘strange’ to many of his readers, as he knows that in current everyday reality they are trapped on the wrong side of the fence, doing ‘slave’s work. Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds. Free communication etween man and man. All things which serve the pleasure of people, free manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth. This redefinition of the meaning of ‘wealth’ echoes Ruskin’s.

The artist should be humble, engaged with the everyday, and willing to make things themselves. Today, the category of ‘artist’ is more removed from everyday creative practices, and often seems to be base don having the ‘right’ kind of art education, artworld connections, and pretentious way of talkin gabout things. Today, the Web means that people don’t have to worry so much about labels – art/craft/whatever and have relatively unlimited channels fors haring stuff they have made. Morris may have had some concerns about the ways in which today’s everyday - creative makers offer their work to be profited from, via advertising, by the owners of the big content-hosting websites such as youtube. The only healthy art, he said, is ‘an art which is to be made by the people and for the people, as a happiness tot the maker and the user’. I am confident in saying that this is much more clearly a description of aily activity on youtube

"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. Its 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 timesless 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 Researchat Victoria and 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, vernacular, and the politics of work.

Decorative art This 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 for the category of 'fine art'. The Vernacular Refers to the authentic, natural vice of a community, unselfconsiously communicated through everyday things that people have made. Politics of work The actual crafted objects become secondary to the broader ideals about the conditions in which they are made. The political message of Ruskin & Morris is that creative workers must be free to express themselvers through the production of whole objects. They have control over their own labour, and contribute to a vibrant and dynamic culture through the creation of their own individual things.

The Arts & Crafts Movement

The combination of these three threads led to the A&Cmovement: 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 succesfull 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.

Philosopher Alan Watts:

"The whole education we get for our children in school is entirely in temrs of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character."

This critical attitude to schooling, allied with notion that people can do things better themselves without such institutions, was reflected in the work of John Holt; How children Fail and How children Learn. Holt: Learning is something humans do from the earliest of age. And that any “machinery” designed to make 'learning' happen as a specific kind of activity, separate from the normal experience of everyday life – as schools intend to so – could only get in the way. This emerged home-schooling movement, literally a DIY approach to education, in which learners are typically supported to follow their own interests and explore the world in whatever way they choose. Holt also argued that children should be trusted to build their own understandings and could make their own meaningfull connections with knowledge, which would be much more useful and effective for them than the abstract pile of procedures and information that children are told that they will need by schools.

Stewart Brand

keyfigure in DIY movement who launched his homemade publication, The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. Which was highly succesful and influentional. It offered readers a (mostly mail-order) gateway to all kinds of resources, including information, technical books, and courses, as well as physical tools such as those for building, metalwork, gardening and early electronics. The phrase “Whole Earth” refers to a picture showing the whole earth from out of space, released by NASA. He thought this picture would change the conciousness of people and help them realize their place in a global system of limited resources.

Statement of purpose in the front of his wel illustrated “Whole Earth Catalog”: We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory – as via government, big business, formal education, church, has succeeded to the points where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing power of the individual to conduct his own edication, find his own inspiration, shape his own inviroment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this proces are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.

Later Brand went on to be a pioneer of home computing and the internet and co-founded the online community, the WELL – The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link.

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.

Amy Spencer

Book: DIY: The Rise of the Lo-Fi Culture. On the first page se says: In the face of the bland consumerist pop that dominates the airwaves and the bestselling celebrity biopgraphies that fill the bookshops it is exciting to realize that there are an increasing amount of independent and creative minds who care enough to go agains the grain and produce music, art, magazines and literature that is truly unique – whether it is likely to sell or not.

Spencer: The internet has enabled DIY culture to become more accesible and less elitist, but, remarkably, it hasn't diminished the enduring appeal of the homemade zine or the 4-track demo.

Spencer: Zines are more like gifts than commercial products, since they are done for love, not for money, and argues that unline mainstream media, the mode of their production is inspiring for readers – showing that you don't have to accept the given culture, and can create your own instead. “Here Women redefined feminism for the 90s and recognised each other as manufacturers of culture, as opposed to participans in a culture that they were encouraged to accept. They were encouraged to reclaim the media and produce their own cultural forms.

Tim Berners-Lee:

inventor of World Wide Web.

Betsy Greer:

craftivism: the confluence of craft and activism. Today it is easy to buy stuff but there is a resistance, a political choice, in not buying those things and choosing to make your own instead.

The central idea at the hart of all approaches and practices of DIY is a rejection of the idea that you overcome problems by paying somebody else to provide a solution. DIY culture says: You can do it yourself, and you can do it with more character, creativity, and relevance than if you got a generic or expert solution. And, importantly, it feels good to do it yourself, its good for your self-esteem – a critical dimension of personal psychology – whereas getting it done for you is disempowering, and often frustrating, and less meaningfull. Our time and skills are usually far from unlimited, so it is often convenient to get experienced people to help us, its keeps the economy going, as people can sell their time and expertise to others.

"4 THE MEANING OF MAKING III: DIGITAL"

The practice of craft – the thoughtful proces of making something with the hands.

Making something for the internet might be seen as the opposite; virtual reality / cyberculture and “the cloud” all give this impression.

Making something to share online can also be seen as craft. You start with nothing accept some tools or materials, there is no prescription and there are infinite possibilities.

Handcoding: proces of building up something for the web, bit by bit. Typing with your hands. Testing from time to time to see if there are any bugs. A tiny bug can make the whole thing stop working. You use a keyboard and a mouse to work, because it is al digital. The personality of the maker still comes across in the finished thing.

“What you see is what you get”- software: the tinkering is less often interrupted by crashes but it is still building something from the ground up, and you still need to make the necessary components (like graphics) elsewhere and then pull them into your website workshop / of if you create an online video you need to cut and edit with images, video and sound / music.

Youtube Launched in 2005. from 2005 till 2007 youtube was more about watching then about communicating.

Youtube is like adding plants to a garden; and those items can be nurtured by others (ratings and links) and responded to(comments of further videos). Its a good form of collaboration.

Chris Anderson made a video which wasn't perfect. He didn't spend ages on cutting together best shots or re-recording audio for a more polished presentation. It was fine – it doesnt mind – it was liberating.

This focus on content, rather than style conveyed the powerfull, inclusive, happy message that 'anyone can do this'.

Ruskin: 'Its better that objects made by hand bear the marks of the efford making them, rather than being polished and impersonal.' “The seven lamps of architecture.” Lamp of life: joy of workers creativity should be visible in the things they produce.

“If you have the thought of a rough and untaught man, you must have it in a rough and untaught way; but from an aducated man, who can without efford express his thoughts in an educated way, take the gracefull expression and be thankfull.

The rule is simple “Always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painfull effort, and no more. Above all, demand no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves' work.

Because of the rough and unpolished video's peoples own creativity get encouraged where a professional quality video would have reinforced the untaught and rough people.

It depents on the maker how liberating the feeling is of an unpolished, rough, video. If you want to make it look and sound as good as you can, you want to impove your skills and become more educated than you were before.

Youtube video: The short, fast, online video. It says nothing about the content.

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.

1: A framework for participation.

The inventation to users to upload their own video's within 15 minutes. Youtube is a database website, which invites people to add data as files, comments, tags and links between different bits of information. Without the response of users to this open inventation, youtube would be (almost) nothing. Now there is a enormous range of topics, diverse styles. Because of the variety of the users. There are numerous well-established corporations forming partnerships with youtube now, but thats only because of the amount of users. There is much evidence that youtubes huge popularity and dominance in the online video field, is due to its emphasis on establishing its framework as one which primarily supports a community of participation and communication amongs everyday-users, rather than elite professionals.

A view on youtube is that its a commercial service offered to users who know what they are dealing with when they use it, and who are basically pleased that it gives them a stage on which to share their thoughts an creativity, and a free network through which they can connect with others for free.

You go on youtube as a free choice, but there is a exploitable surplus.

Mark Andrejevic: “the users activity, freely given by people as they upload videos and conduct community activity on the site, to be a new form of exploitation. Youtube is a bussines build on the labour of unpaid videomakers around the world. In addition as user move around youtube, willingly indicating their interests and preferences through their searches, clicks and ratings, they generate valuable markingdata which is gathered by the corporation and used for commercial purposes. He thinks Youtube hates its users, he is pro no amature files and thinks it would be better delivering videos from more profitable professional content provided by commercial partners.

But ofcourse Youtube thanks its popularity because of amateur contibutions.

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 opportunies 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 standart' productions.

Clay Shirky:

“if online material seems pointless or blaffing, the explanation is usually: 'Its simple. They're not talking to you

Martin Creed mentioned that on of his motivations to make creative work is just to “say hello” and these video's of affinity sit in that tradition, same as the “I just called to say hello”phonecall.

A lot of material on youtube is made with a great deal of care and/or ingenuity by users who hope to entertain their friendsd an also, potentionally, attract a wider audience.

Analysis of 4320 populair videos conducted by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green in 2007: 42 per cent: Mainstream, broadcast or established media. 50 per cent: Orriginal user-created video's. 40 per cent: Videoblogs 15 per cent: user created musicvideo's. 13 per cent: live material, music performances, sport and “slice of life” 10 per cent: non-fiction presentations and news reviews 8 per cent: “scripted material” – comedy sketches, animation and machinima. 10 per cent: experimental or technical playfull videos. 8 per cent: Sources of uncertain status.

Because these statistics are from youtube alone, it can't tell anything about the motivations of the creators.

It seems reasonable to suggest that their makers wish to communicatie and connect with an audience, often on an emotional or intimate level, to share their knowledge or insights, to entertain and to show of, and, in doing so, try to connect or have an impact on others.

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.

Henry Jenkins:

Engagement is not a route to online stardom, ofcourse. Youtube offers strong social incentives to make and share, and that users are inspired by the emotional support of a community eager to see their productions. Quoting Yochai Benkler: Participation in an online culture can make their practitioners better “readers” of their own culture and more self-reflective and critica of the culture they occupy.

Youtube is a platform which offers a framework of participation, but which is open to a very wide variety of uses and contributors, ands basically agnostic about the content, which means it had been adopted by a wude range of user for a diverse array of purposes. People use Youtube to communicate and connect, to share knowledge and skills, and to entertain. They use the community features of the site to support each other and engage in debates, and to generate the characteristics of a gift economy. Whilst it is true that the majority of visitors of youtube are viewing, not producing and participating, there are still literally millions of users who engage with this creative platform every day, and whose relationship with professional media has been fundamentally shifted because of the knowledge that they can be the creators and not just receivers of inventive media.

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. Some people find all this information to be just unwanted trivia or annoying noise. But succes of social networking sites shows people do get something from the regular sharing of ordinary fragments of everyday life. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we're not able to participate as closely as we'd like.

Writing a blog is rather time-consuming and quite hard work. Some people do get income from their blogs, other people don't. So why do people make blogs?

David Jennigs:

educational consultant from London has written one blogpost every day since 20 december 2005. www.musicarcades.com, a blog about his everyday life based around his recordcollection. He writes about personal memories and the associations that each one evokes, as well as some musical reflections and connections, notes about the sleeve, or anything else that you might like to file under “cultural” commentary. It takes him about an hour a day. “Its a kind of journey. It's about my love affair with listening to music, refracted through a series of snapshots. It's about trying to mak sense of how music is bound up with my life. And it's also about the pathology of collecting – and means I have to give real attention to the things I've collected, one by one, rather than just piling them up.

But why as a blog?

“It's saying this is something I have passion about. And it's harder to give up when it's public – there 's a kind of public commitment to continue. I like the idea that people wil stumble across the blog, when searching for information about some obscure record, and might feel a shared moment of enthusiasm for frankly rather a nutty project.

So its partly a personal endeavour, the blogger wants to, regardles of audience, to connect with other people, some of whom share ideas, feelings and musical associations of their own, and some of whom are imagined future readers.

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

provided a different perspective on these questions in a study of online fans of Swedish indepentend pop music. The question whether fans who produce elaborate blogs or podcats about a particular commercial scene are being 'exploioted' because they provide 'free labor' for an enterprise which may ultimately make money for someone other the themselves. Baym and Burnett found that bloggers and podcast-producers don't usually consider themselves exploited. They enjoy creative activity and the connection it brings with other fans and the musicians themselves. In scenes like this, exploitation and jurst rewards are matters of perception. These users spend great amounts of time maintaining their websites, but the benefits included engaging with music, working with creative people they admired, and the oppertunity for self-expression, and 'to make a meaningful contributions to a cultural domain that brings them pleassure.

Partly people make things and share them because they want to – the proces 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 froms first idea through to completion.

Rozsika Parker:

embroidery could have 'a transformative impact on the sense of self.' embroidery replaced with blogging: “Winnicott's theory of mirroring helps us to understand how the experience of blogging and the blog affirms the self as a being with agency, acceptability and potency. The blogger sees a positive reflection of herself in her work ad, importantly, in the reception of her work by others.”

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.