I’m always uncomfortable with it. I’m uncomfortable with any culture that encourages you take on an entire identity, rather than to express a facet of your own identity (“maker,” rather than “someone who makes things”). But I have much deeper concerns.
An identity built around making things—of being “a maker”—pervades technology culture. There’s a widespread idea that “People who make things are simply different [read: better] than those who don’t.”
Debbie Chachra, Why I Am Not a Maker (The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 23 Jan. 2015
This passage really grabbed my attention because I would personally consider myself a “maker”. As such, I was immediately taken back when she started her blog off by implying that being a “maker” wasn’t all that good. I felt, low-key, personally attacked. What could be so wrong about the art of “creating”. Makers are the only reason why society has evolved up until this point. So why has Debbie felt so wronged by the label? I’ve always thought it was a cool thing to be a maker.
Since I spent a lot of times in my high school years working with computer drafting and other engineering-related projects, making has been something I hold very dear. And to be honest, I kind of indulge in the thought that I’m actually contributing to society somehow, rather than just wasting my time away in front of a computer: “I’m making something for y’all”. It was always enjoyable to see the things I’ve created intriguing others. Their reaction alone is totally worth the long hours that went into the works. Creating was/is my way of giving back to my community, and that’s something I take great pride in.
Though I have to admit, Debbie does have a point though. Since I’ve spent so much of my time associating myself with being a “maker”, I never bothered to take a step back and realize the social stigma behind it. To me, being a maker was never about how much stuff you could create. It was more the idea, the process of trying to ‘give birth to something that wasn’t there before’ that has drawn me to the field. It’s the thought of making something, it could be anything (even teaching counts as making…you’re creating better people!) that makes the profession worthwhile. How much or how little to contribute doesn’t actually matter all that much.
To that end, I’m planning on going back to digital drafting / website making in the near future. Through this class, I hope to add augment knowledge in web-hosting/digital drafting and see how it could contributes to the humanities. After all, this is something that I really enjoy doing in my free time, expanding it to a non-STEM related field might just add an extra dimension of fun to it.
