DIY Featured in Design Awards

adamsj [2006-12-10 09:28 AM]

I'm always thrilled to see Make, which I love (and yet manage to bear loaning out) getting recognition.


I'm troubled, though, by treating DIY as both a current and a new idea. My experience of DIY is that it runs back at least into the early days of punk rock and its cultural peers. (A good argument might be made that SF fanzines predate punk as a DIY movement, but I don't know that I could show much influence from the one forward to the other.) There's a reason that Rhino Records titled its great (well, the ones I have are great) set of early punk/New Wave anthology CDs DIY.


Here, I think, is one of the reasons Tim has gotten so much flak about gender balance at O'Reilly events.


The DIY movement I experienced from the late seventies through the early nineties was, in part, motivated by people who were excluded (for whatever reasons) from the main currents of culture. One of the goals of a fair number of us was to get rid of cock rock and jock rock, or at least get it out of the way of those of us who wanted something else. (As Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers said, "I came of age rebelling against the music of my high-school parking lot.")


That required some level of conscious, explicit inclusiveness, and gender balance was one of the biggest items on our agenda. Like much of what we practiced, that was both an end and a means to that and other ends.


So: Those of us who have that conception of DIY get a little antsy when we see (for instance) mostly male line-ups at events.


I know there are other people who went through that same cultural moment and have a whole different take on what they were trying to achieve. However, I think what I've said here represents a lot--possibly a plurality--of those people.

Michael Bernstein [2006-12-10 12:41 PM]

"Walk the walls"? Did you mean "halls"?

adamsj [2006-12-10 09:00 PM]

Dale,


I don't have any issues with gender imbalance at Make, as I'm used to the idea that magazines are segmented by reader demographics and driven by advertising dollars. (I do have that issue with the misleadingly-named Parenting, which is so obviously directed towards mothers and not fathers that I can't find much of anything to help me as a male parent in it.) I've heard a couple of the same comments you've heard about Make, but I take them with a grain of salt.


Conferences are a little different, I think. Almost anyone can start a magazine--I've proved it!--but physical events have a high barrier to entry. Accordingly, I think there's a stronger affirmative reason to make them more inclusive and balanced.


That's not the point I wanted to make, though. I mainly wanted to clue you in on a point of culture clash which I think underlies some of the criticism you folks hear. I doubted you'd heard that particular point of view and thought you might find it useful.


Now, DIY as an idea I don't think can go back any further than the beginning of mass production, which I understand as starting with Eli Whitney in the late 1700's. Sure, there was division of labor before that, but the difference between an amateur and a craftsman is minor compared to the difference between either of them and a factory. There's where I take the roots of DIY as a deviation from the norm to be, in reaction against mass production and mass culture.


I'd be very curious to hear from your readings of old magazines whether and when you might note a shift from making your own things as something people did as a matter of fact and necessity to something people did as optional, special and unusual. (Unfortunately, my old collections of magazines like Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated disappeared during a move in the late seventies. I'm still bummed about that--I started reading them as a little kid, and I miss them.)


As to the history of DIY in music and popular culture, I'd have to give that some thought, and probably ask around a little bit, to turn you up a couple of interesting references. I'd definitely put punk rock there--not just the musical artifacts, but also the fanzines and fashions--and I believe SF fanzines, too, as I mentioned. Around the early eighties, the mini-comic started showing up--there's crossover there with punk--which was even more underground than underground comics.


There's more than one story in PAIA Electronics, the company that made build-your-own synthesizer kits from the early seventies, and you could carry that over to Craig Anderson's columns about making your own electronic music devices. I'd be curious to see a good history of ham radio, too. My memory from my Uncle Howard was that hams who built their own rigs from scratch looked down a bit on those who bought theirs. When, I wonder, did that come about?


We could also draw a line of influence to The Whole Earth Catalog (which is where I learned about GANTT charts and critical paths, I note parenthetically), and to the counterculture generally, beginning right after the end of World War II. The counterculture generated so many cultural fractions which had particular, unserviced minority needs that making their own stuff, individually, collectively, or as a cottage industry, became a common activity.


In my mind, I see DIY starting as a Depression/WWII survival skill. I don't know that's accurate, and I'm sure that view is colored by having parents from that era. Probably it's got other, less directly material root causes as well.