Meet Your Makers

[ Thanks to Bernard Swiss for this link. ]

"Some of the things we came across in the first few classes were jawdropping. Like the video MacPhail showed us of a three-dimensional printer that's able to replicate itself (you'll learn read about 3D printers in the Fabricator episode). Even so, we were not quite sure what Maker Culture was and what it had to do with us. "I guess I kind of thought that, you know, people had always been making things," said Geoff Turner, a UWO student in the Masters of Journalism program. He wasn't wrong. There have always been makers: web-hackers, hobbyists and ancient ancestors who created tools of survival. But the modern Maker Culture movement is more involved than that. It's about sharing what you've made, how you've made it, and why. Often, for free.

""Another word for it is the Enlightenment," said Cory Doctorow, a Canadian science fiction writer, activist and the author of the book Makers. "The advent of... public sharing of information and knowledge was the Enlightenment. It was the great leap in human progress that ended the dark ages." It is this sense of sharing and community that binds the self-educator to the broom-smith, and the broom-smith to a food artist who makes necklaces made of dried kiwi. What MacPhail noticed, and challenged us to document, was an over-arching cultural shift -- Maker Culture."

Complete Story

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