Maker's Mark: Protest Against the Efficiency Society

Being "a maker" is a badge that many wear with tremendous pride; along with being "a disruptor" and "an innovator", I'd be willing to bet that "maker" is one of the fastest growing social media descriptors people apply to themselves.  The appellation is has become so prolific that many people refer to the identification as a movement - the Maker movement.

So what does it mean to be a maker?

The bins of goodies in our school's maker space

As far as I can tell, a maker is someone who physically produces something - i.e. "makes" something, whether that something is a craft project like home-made coasters or super fancy drag-racing box cars.  Advocacy for the maker movement is tremendous, particularly in progressive educational circles.  I've heard speakers on NPR advocating for the creation of "maker spaces", in some cases as a way to save school media centers as interactive spaces both for information and objects.

The most puzzling thing to me about the head of steam that coalesced behind this maker idea is that 99% of the things that seem to fall into this category are hobbies and crafts that have existed for decades.  There is nothing new about this whole emerging cultural meme, except perhaps for the idea that people that make things and interact with objects in a tactile way should be lauded; that "making" should be a point of pride.

The romanticism of the maker movement is, I think, an outgrowth of a broader cultural trend that we all struggle against - the disempowering nature of overwhelming access to information.  It's natural to lose the enchantment of building a cool box car when google can show you 500 other peoples' models that put more time and energy into it than you did; we live in an age where the natural pool of comparison for any endeavor has become global in scope.  The natural consequence of that for many has been a shift into a life mode totally focused around knowledge processing (understanding things that other people have done), rather than knowledge creation (understanding things by first-hand interaction with phenomena).

students working on a functional decomposition of a bicycle

I don't think that's a bad thing.  We've outsourced so much of our life experience to the information processing power of the efficiency society, working on the assumption that doing so will leave time in our lives for other, more meaningful pursuits.  Has it been the case for those of you out there that have lived through the emergence of the modern information age that your life has become more meaningful?  I'd be willing to bet that the answer is no.

The maker movement is  an expression in the Zeitgeist of this intangible sense of loss we've collectively experienced; a realization that what makes our life meaningful isn't connection to a vast and powerful apparatus of data analysis, but the thousands of small discoveries that populate a life of curiosity and engagement with the present.