Making is Connecting E-Book

David Gauntlett

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 463

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Pages

ii

iii

iv

vi

vii

viii

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

167

168

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

177

178

179

180

181

182

183

184

185

186

187

188

189

190

191

192

193

194

195

196

197

198

199

200

201

202

203

204

205

206

207

208

209

210

211

212

213

214

215

216

217

218

219

220

221

222

223

224

225

226

227

228

229

230

231

232

233

234

235

236

237

238

239

240

241

242

243

244

245

246

247

248

249

250

251

252

253

254

255

256

257

258

259

260

261

262

263

264

265

266

267

268

269

270

271

272

273

274

275

276

277

278

279

280

281

282

283

284

285

286

287

288

289

290

291

292

293

294

295

296

297

298

299

300

301

302

303

304

305

306

307

308

309

310

311

312

313

314

315

316

317

318

For Finn

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 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published in 2011 by Polity PressThis second edition published in 2018 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1351-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gauntlett, David, author.Title: Making is connecting : the social power of creativity, from craft and knitting to digital everything / David Gauntlett.Description: Second edition. | Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Revised edition of the author’s Making is connecting, 2011. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017043969 (print) | LCCN 2017052215 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509513512 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509513475 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509513482 (paperback)Subjects: LCSH: Social networks. | Creative ability--Social aspects. | Web 2.0--Social aspects. | Culture. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies.Classification: LCC HM741 (ebook) | LCC HM741 .G38 2018 (print) | DDC 302.30285--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043969

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For the first edition of this book, I acknowledged the help and support of many fine individuals. Here I have ungraciously clumped the key people into this one paragraph and sorted them into alphabetical order. Sorry. But, genuinely, many thanks to: Edith Ackermann, David Brake, Tessy Britton, Nick Couldry, Andrea Drugan, Andrew Dubber, Jenny Gauntlett, Pete Goodwin, David Hendy, Annette Hill, Dougald Hine, David Jennings, Jesper Just Jensen, Anastasia Kavada, Knut Lundby, Anthony McNicholas, Alison Powell, Tim Riley, Amanda Blake Soule, Jeanette Steemers, Paul Sweetman, Anna-Sophie Trolle Terkelsen, Cecilia Weckström, David Whitebread and Thomas Wolbers.

I am also grateful to Tiziano Bonini, who did a very nice translation of the book into Italian (La Società dei Makers), and the nameless employees of Samcheolli Publishing in Seoul, who made a neat Korean version with bonus pictures.

For this second edition, I would like to give many thanks to – again in alphabetical order – Fauzia Ahmad, Pete Astor, Jen Ballie, Mary Kay Culpepper, Susie Farrell, Christian Fuchs, Matt Gooderson, Roland Harwood, Kirsten Hermes, Heidi Herzogenrath-Amelung, Velislava Hillman, Julia Keyte, I-Ching Liao, Simon Lindgren, Sunil Manghani, Winston Mano, Graham Meikle, Kirstin Mey, David Pallash, Mike Press, Mitch Resnick, Isabelle Risner, David Sheppard, Katie Smith, Tina Holm Sorensen, Jonathan Stockdale, Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Clare Twomey and Cecilia Weckström.

Many thanks to Mary Savigar, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and Elen Griffiths at Polity for being such supportive editors, and I am grateful to Breffni O’Connor, Clare Ansell, Jane Fricker and Leigh Mueller on the production and marketing side.

I should also thank all the sharp, diverse and witty students who helped to refine some of these thoughts by participating in my ‘Creativity’ module at the University of Westminster in the years since 2010.

In the first edition, I was pleased to acknowledge the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Research Councils UK Digital Economy programme, for research awards which – as I said then – ‘although not specifically supporting this project, did fund related work and gave me time to think about these things’. Those included projects with the reference numbers AH/H038736/1, AH/F009682/1, AH/F006756/1 and EP/H032568/1. For work conducted between the first and second editions, I acknowledge the support of the ‘Digital DIY’ project, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme (Grant agreement 644344); ‘Digital Folk’, funded by the AHRC (AH/L014858/1); ‘Advancing Social Media Studies’, funded by STINT in Sweden; and ‘Community-powered Transformations’, funded by the AHRC (AH/J01303X/1).

As ever, huge love to Finn and Edie for supporting and inspiring me every day. And last but most, all my love and gratitude to Jenny for being such a thoughtful and creative partner in ideas and life and everything.

As always, the responsibility for any weird arguments, spurious sentimentality and unreasonable optimism that you may find here remains my own.

1INTRODUCTION

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 organizations, big and small, to make stuff available 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.

Figure 1: Social media as a communal allotment

This is actually 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 naïve, and bonkers. 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 learned 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 channel, 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 Wikipedia 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 internet, 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 enthusiasts 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 whether the Wikipedia model of encyclopaedia-making can be translated across to – well, everything else. In these cases, Wikipedia becomes a metaphor for highly participatory and industrious collaboration. However, most of the time they’re not really thinking of ‘everything else’ – it’s ‘everything else online’. Wikipedia becomes a model of highly participatory and industrious online collaboration. 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 familiar 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 connects 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 magic of the glossy, shiny and new in consumer culture; the ‘making and doing’ is what this book is all about.

THE ‘SIT BACK AND BE TOLD’ CULTURE

Since the historical point at which education became institutionalized 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 and 1970s, school 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 formalized, and have been used to assemble league tables of schools, which in turn mean that each school has a vested interest in getting children to do well in the tests. Governments around the world seem to feel obliged to commit to the notion of ‘testing and accountability’ even though all the evidence suggests that quality learning is destroyed by an over-emphasis on testing.4

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 than four and a half hours of television per day, much as they had done 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 lot, and since it’s an average, you know that for everybody 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 it points to the way in which the arrival of a medium, such as television, in our lives, can affect the way we live – not really because of the content of the messages it carries, but from the generally less noticed ways in which it causes us to rearrange our everyday lives. This is a very good insight. Media ‘effects’, when we are talking about media content, are notoriously 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 terms 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 full 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 dramatically crushing our will on the industrial wheel, but by encouraging us to enjoy a flow of convenient, cheerful 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.

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 acknowledge 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 that environmental pollution and other societal problems are generally seen as troubling, but distant, and basically ‘somebody else’s problem’.

TOWARDS A ‘MAKING AND DOING’ CULTURE

More optimistically, however, we can see a growing engagement with a ‘making and doing’ culture. This orientation rejects the passivity of the ‘sit back’ model, and seeks opportunities 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 captured 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 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 walls, these classrooms show works in progress, experiments, 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 everyday life, there has of course been a huge shift towards more interactive, internet-based tools and services. The launch of social 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 1 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.13 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 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 sustainable ways of living.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 activities 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 ‘creativity’. 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 creations. This seems to put him at the old-fashioned, or at least the elite, end of the scale, but there are perfectly good reasons 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 inspiration, he argues, creative outputs appear from individuals who have worked hard over many years to master a particular ‘symbolic domain’ (physics, poetry, architecture, or whatever) 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, science, or society. He writes:

Creativity, at least as I define it in this book, is a process by which 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 creativity which is noticed and appreciated by other people:

According to this view, creativity results from the interaction 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 formulation needs a particular 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 has never been seen before in the world. Then, as if that wasn’t hard enough already, it has to be recognized as a brilliantly original thing by other people. Furthermore, they can’t be just any people, but have to be the movers and shakers, the well-known thought leaders, in the field where you hope to make an impact. (This makes life especially difficult since the established people in any particular area are typically attached to their own high status, and are not necessarily likely to give a warm reception to promising newcomers.)

That’s one way of looking at creativity, and it is 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 Csikszentmihalyi’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, creativity 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 call creativity become rather fuzzy, of course. If I managed to bake and decorate a birthday cake which looked like a dinosaur, for instance, I would feel really ‘creative’. And you might agree. But if you had been told that I was a professional birthday cake-maker who had been producing 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 trivial, about whether one thing ‘is’ and another thing ‘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 “definitions” of creativity I have seen in the literature … carry the 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 product, 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.

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 THIS BOOK IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT

This book is a discussion about the value of everyday creativity, taking in handmade physical objects and real-life experiences as well as the recent explosion of online creativity. Indeed, it seeks to make connections from one sphere to the other, in the hope that we can learn about recent creativity 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 generally done through the use of some relevant theories and philosophies – quite grounded and earthy ones, nothing very abstract – and knitted, I hope, into the reality and experience of particular creative activities.

This is not, though, a set of case studies about particular craftspeople, artisans, bloggers and YouTube-makers. That wasn’t meant to be the 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 Fixing Things Feels Good by the philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford (published in the US with the slightly shorter title, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work); Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World by Mark Frauenfelder, the Editor-in-Chief of Make magazine; and Why We Make Things and Why it Matters: The Education of a Craftsman by woodworker Peter Korn.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