Cover Page

For Finn

MAKING IS CONNECTING

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

Second expanded edition

DAVID GAUNTLETT











polity

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.

PREAMBLE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Hello, and welcome, or welcome back, to Making is Connecting. This tries to be a fundamentally positive book about a fundamentally positive thing – the power of making. Everyday creativity can give us a sense of potency, expressive ways to connect with other people, and a sense of meaningful engagement with the world. This has been true for many thousands of years, but has been boosted and amplified in recent times by the emergence of accessible networked technologies that enable us to connect, exchange things, and inspire each other.

The first edition of this book was written in 2009–10, and came out in 2011. Here I greet you at the start of the second edition, which I revised and wrote in 2016–17, to come out in 2018. ‘Making is connecting’ is a timeless proposition, and should be a pretty time-proof book, but, you know, things happen, and the context changes even when the essence of creativity remains the same. So there are some things we need to deal with here.

NEW GLOOM

Frankly, when we think about the digitally-connected world, things do seem rather less bright and shiny than before. There are three striking and depressing elements, and each is huge. First, governments around the world turned out to be much more committed to 1984-style mass surveillance – recording everyone’s online interactions – than ever seemed either possible or likely. It was in 2013 that Edward Snowden bravely exposed the unexpectedly vast level of monitoring and storage of personal communications in the US, and by implication – or explicit extension – everywhere else. A few years on, this fundamental lack of personal privacy seems to be more-or-less accepted as normal.

Second, the corporations running online platforms were revealed as ruthless monopolies that suck vast amounts of money out of the creative ecosystem, while contributing nothing other than services to advertisers. Of course, it was well known that record companies and publishers in the twentieth century were ungenerous to artists, but new modes of distribution – especially for music – have counterintuitively decimated the opportunities for the majority of artists to make a living. (Jonathan Taplin’s 2017 book Move Fast and Break Things is especially persuasive on this topic.1) Online creativity isn’t all about making money. But, in the case of music, say, you would have thought that as we have incredible new technologies that enable people to make and distribute work – and now that so many people have a musicplaying phone in their pocket, directly connected to this network – with more than 2 billion smartphone users in the world in 20172 – there should be much better opportunities for people to be paid for making music that people want to listen to.

Third, a noisy minority of ‘ordinary people’ online started spoiling it for everyone else with vile misogyny, racism, homophobia and other bigotry and threatening behaviour – enabled by the same platforms that in other contexts had seemed so useful for the exchange of creative ideas and practices. There have been ‘trolls’ and horribleness on the internet since its earliest days, but it seems to have exploded in a few years. In 2014 I remember feeling really sick and depressed when Emma Watson made an excellent speech at the UN about how feminism is for everyone, and was hit with a tidal wave of rape threats and other misogyny. On Twitter, appalled and exasperated, and breaking with my old-fashioned polite tweeting style, I said: ‘Hey internet. I spend my professional life saying you people are fundamentally decent. You’ve really let me down with this Emma Watson shit.’3

The repulsive ‘Gamergate’ controversy,4 the unbelievable racist and sexist noise from idiots around the 2016 Ghostbusters movie,5 the treatment of female politicians and public figures daily, and many more examples make it really hard for hopeful optimists to not just give up in disgust. But you can’t leave everything to pessimists, you really can’t.

SO IS THE INTERNET ALL BAD NOW?

This book is not all about the internet, but the internet certainly plays a valuable and central role in our story. The three strong reasons for despondency mentioned above offer no positives, except as things to work against and away from. It’s hard to discuss anything that happens online these days without being reminded of these dark clouds – and/or being considered stupid for not engaging with them. I guess there are people who look at books like Making is Connecting, and think: How can you still be optimistic about the power of the internet, when we know all this bad stuff?

And I get it: this is a good question, and not one to be ducked. But on the whole, the bad things are not much to do with the good things – except that they are enabled by the same technologies. They are simply different issues. The positive things can be positive, the negative things are negative, and then we have to work out what to do.

The internet enables people to connect with others, share creative projects, and be inspired by each other, in ways which were not possible before – because it is global and searchable. Previously you could connect and share and be inspired by local people, if you happened to have a way of identifying people in your area interested in the same kinds of stuff. This was difficult, but possible. Doing it quickly and on a potentially global scale was impossible. The fact that the internet enables us to design and make lovely ways to show off our creative abilities, exchange ideas, and build networks of like-minded people who can support and inspire each other, is still amazing. It was amazing twenty-five years ago, when the first webpages were being born, and it’s just as amazing today. And of course, we have much better infrastructure, hardware and software for doing this stuff, and with more than 3 billion people now online, there’s a good chance someone shares some of your creative passions.6 Is this still amazing, and powerful? Yes it is.

At the same time, we cannot and should not ignore what we now know about the mass surveillance, the aggressive monopoly capitalism of the major online platforms, and the trolling and misogyny. This is all mind-bendingly dreadful. Whole excellent books have been written about each of those issues, but – just so you know – that’s not my job here. Those issues are really important, but they are just not what this book is about. We need to arrive at a much better situation in each of those areas. Meanwhile, I still want to talk about the good things we can still do, and the better world that it is important for us to imagine.

INTERNET = WORLD

The thing is: the internet mirrors our world. That doesn’t mean that everyone in the world is equally represented on the internet, because the internet mirrors the unfairness and inequalities of our world. The internet also mirrors some nice things in the world, because the world does still have some nice things in it.

The internet enables people to amplify dimensions of the world, making both good and bad things louder and more noticeable. So you can quickly get to inspiring communities, gorgeous designs and wonderful ideas, or just as swiftly you can find offensive, awful and depressing material. It’s a complex world, and one person’s centre of inspiration might be someone else’s epitome of repulsion. And this is not to be taken lightly. There are horrifically awful things on the internet. But they were put there by people. People in the world.

So, dismissing ‘the internet’ is like dismissing ‘the world’. When people say ‘How can you still be optimistic about the power or potential of the internet, now that we know all this about it?’, it really is the same as asking how we can still feel optimistic about communities of human beings, considering what we know about various grim aspects of the behaviour of some people. The answer is – the answer has to be – that most people really aren’t that bad; and that, even when some of them seem to have turned out really disagreeable, we still have to have hope for, and therefore make plans about, how to make things better.

And, I’m sorry, but it really is stupid to conclude that just because you know X or Y negative things about the internet there’s therefore no point being positive about any possibilities of online connection, conversation or inspiration. That’s just such a binary way of looking at it.

I understand how the brain can get dragged in that way. If you spend time studying the details of some case of neglect or abuse, it’s easy and indeed quite normal to feel depressed and think ‘Ugh, people are just horrible’. But, they are not. We may all recognize that feeling of revulsion – and the irrational temporary transfer of the feeling about a particular case to a feeling about everything – but it’s still irrational. Similarly, people who spend much of their time studying the negative sides of online life will probably, understandably, consider the whole internet to be awful. But it’s not. And it’s straightforwardly irrational to think that it is. The internet mirrors the world. It’s silly to say that everything on the internet, and everything that can be done on it, is wonderful, and it’s equally daft to say that it’s all bad or should be done away with.

I suppose if you’re a proper nihilist, and you’re actually signed up to the idea that everything and everyone actually is awful, then we have to allow you to say the same about online life too. But for the rest of us, we have to accept the complicated mix. As a wise person once noted, the typical human existence brings a pile of good things and a pile of bad things. ‘The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice-versa, the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things, or make them unimportant.’7

The piles sit side by side. Focusing all your attention on the pile of good things doesn’t make the bad things go away – as people have enjoyed telling me – but equally, emphasizing the negative side-effects (or even planned uses) of technologies doesn’t change the positive reality of the good things that have also been done.

There are people who regard themselves as ‘critical’ theorists, writers or researchers, who think that being critical means pointing out the negative side of everything. But that’s not what critical means. I think being critical means having a full understanding of negative threats, and the intended and unintended consequences of things in the world, and balancing this with an awareness of, and engagement with, ways in which we can make life better.

SECOND EDITION: WHAT’S THE SAME AND WHAT’S DIFFERENT

Some parts of this book are unapologetically the same as last time, but other parts have changed much more. In some places I have deleted or shortened things that were in the first edition, to make room for new things – generally parts that seemed longwinded or not so relevant today. In removing those things I have comforted myself with the thought that they are not expunged from the universe forever, because if you really want, you can still get hold of the first edition. Also I am aware that Making is Connecting is, to date, my best book, and has a few friends, so some people who already have the first one might get this second one too – and I want those people to be rewarded with a suitably renewed book with whole chunks of new stuff in it.

To make things easy for those of you who have the first edition and want to know what’s new – here are the key new things in this edition:

Notes