My article “‘We Need a Showing of All Hands’: Technological Utopianism in Make Magazine” will be published next month in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, and is already available to those with access through the Sage website. If you’d like a copy, let me know. Here’s a short summary, but the article provides much more evidence and analysis.
It’s great when your research interests line up with your personal interests. I was always curious about the Maker Faire, an event sponsored by Make magazine in San Mateo, California, and other cities around the U.S. The Faire seemed like a great place for someone with both crafty and geeky tendencies to hang out. I had been reading Make occasionally and enjoyed the magazine, too.
As a journalism researcher, I was also aware of other trends in the magazine industry — specifically, the increasing popularity of real-world magazine events that reinforce the magazines’ brands and unite the “imagined community” of magazine readers by bringing them together at events. I was curious about this trend as both a business strategy and a growing cultural phenomenon. So, this geeky crafter headed to the May 2009 San Mateo Maker Faire ready not just to learn some new skills, but also with a participant observation research mindset fully in place.
What I found at the Maker Faire was so compelling that I ended up conducting an entire research project around the event and the magazine’s content. I was fascinated to see the nationalistic and political references throughout the Faire, such as flags on posters and quotes from then-newly inaugurated President Barack Obama on posters and stickers. The Faire and magazine’s promise of self-actualization and community building through “making” was also evident in various ways. It was a heady mix that, well, made you want to make.
Making in itself isn’t problematic. It’s fun. However, a closer look at the Faire and the magazine’s content showed that there was another, subtler promise being made about making. There was a deeply rooted sense of “technological utopianism,” or the concept that humans can, through the savvy development and application of technology, create an ideal world.
Moreover, I felt something different developing when I looked closely at the Faire and the magazine: the representation of a possibility for “technological rehabilitation” — the idea that, having fully exploited our ecological world to the point of serious damage, we might find ways to rehabilitate it through the use of technology. Make and the Maker Faire suggest we can develop those rehabilitating technologies ourselves, on our own terms, for our own enjoyment and satisfaction, but also for the salvation of our entire (American) nation.
While this is a tempting narrative for those seeking hope in challenging times, I was forced ultimately to question whether a narrative of “technological rehabilitation” was a positive one for readers of Make and participants in the Maker Faire, and for our world at large. While individual makers’ innovations toward the goal of ecological rehabilitation would be positive steps, they are not necessarily as effective as Make would seem to suggest, given that the efforts of individuals to, say, build rain barrels or reuse plastic bags in interesting ways unfortunately pale in comparison to the constant injury done to the environment by larger political and economic forces.
This is not to say that “makers” shouldn’t continue to try to find new and more environmentally sound ways to do things, but that the story that Make tells about making is not necessarily the best story for us to hear about the role of technology in the world. Instead, we have to look at other ways in which technology has damaged the world and ways we may need to innovate non-technologically, to live with less or different technology, as our ecological systems have likely been damaged past the point of no return. Stories and events that help readers think in that direction might ultimately be more productive for ensuring the survival of humanity long-term.
Like Robert Jensen, one of my mentors whose writing helped inspire this study, I am curious about ways journalism can provide alternative narratives for our future — not just revise old ones for an increasingly desperate time. Stories and events that can unite people around those narratives could be powerful.
