Description
Book SynopsisMaking Our World: The Hacker and Maker Movements in Context describes and situates the political, historical, national, and organizational elements of hacking and making. Hackers and makers are often mythologized, leading to people misunderstanding them as folk heroes for the modern age. In response, this book describes and critiques these movements from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives to help readers appreciate their worldwide scope and highly localized interpretations. Making Our World is essential reading for students and scholars of technology and society, particularly those interested in social movements and DIY cultures.
Trade Review“
Making Our World offers an expansive view of the continued evolution of discourses on hacking and making. Readers will appreciate the revitalizing commentary from various geographies and viewpoints that trouble taken-for-granted associations of making and hacking in the contemporary global economy and culture. This book is good reading for those seeking to understand not just the ideals and values that continue to be attached to making and hacking but also the variegated situated practices that accompany their reproduction and repurposes in various sociopolitical contexts.” —Seyram Avle, Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
“This brilliant book analyses hacking and making: the leading spirits of our technological age.
Making Our World is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how information technologies are being created and are creating our society and the strategies being used by those who make such technologies outside of corporations and governments. The book brings together world-leading experts on some of the most recent technological innovations, and these authors deliver a powerful analysis of the global meaning of both making and hacking technologies. Importantly, the book has a genuinely international reach because it refuses to take the ‘global’ to be some generic allencompassing idea and instead analyses in specific contexts around the world the different ways hacking and making create and are being created in society.” —Tim Jordan, Professor of Digital Cultures at the University of Sussex
“
Making Our World draws important and under-realized connections between often disparate strands of scholarship around the promise of hacking and making. From critical perspectives to hopeful exemplars, the authors pose new forms of world-building as central sites to illuminate the often mystifying influence of technology cultures. Hacking is not only ordinary, the authors show, but also tied up in the production of ordinariness—of the everyday concerns, identities, and collectives through which transformations of civil society unfold. Whether in makerspaces, start-up lofts, hackathons, or protests—online or out on the streets—these grounded studies interrogate and, in some cases, recover the often precarious terms of neoliberal educational and economic reform.” —Daniela Rosner, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington
Table of ContentsJeremy Hunsinger/Andrew R. Schrock: Introduction – Andrew R. Schrock: Section I: Histories Introduction – T. Philip Nichols/Debora Lui: Learning by Doing: The Tenuous Alliance of the "Maker Movement" and Education Reform – Molly R. Sauter: Kevin Mitnick, The New York Times, and the Media’s Conception of the Hacker – Yasuhito Abe: Making Civic Media in the Post-Fukushima Japanese Media Ecology – Rhea Vichot: Project Chanology and the Formation of Anonymous as an Activist Movement – Andrew R. Schrock: Section II: Politics Introduction – Nathanael Bassett: Conscientious Hacking and the Weak Collective – Arne Hintz: Policy Hacking: Opening Up the Code of Media and Communications Regulation – Morgan Currie: Hacking Administration—A Report From Los Angeles – Sebastian Kubitschko: Why Locality and Presence (Still) Matter for Political Activism – Jeremy Hunsinger: Section: III: Organizing Introduction – Alexander von Lünen: Basteln, Tinkering, and Bricolage: A Cultural History of Hacking – Jennifer Maher: Women’s Hacking of the Poison Gift of Free/Libre/Open Source Software – Alison E. Vogelaar/Charlotte M. McKernan: Making Space for a Revolution: Occupy Wall Street as a Maker Movement – Ann Light: The Détente Model of Managing Divergent Values in the Maker-Sphere – Jeremy Hunsinger: Section IV: Case Studies Introduction – Pip Shea: Hacker Agency and the Raspberry Pi: Informal Education and Social Innovation in a Belfast Makerspace – Nicholas Balaisis: Hacking as a Way of Life: "Makers" at the Margins of Global Digital Culture – Xin Gu: The Paradox of Maker Movement in China – Karen Louise Smith: Our Community Hacks: Exploring Hive Toronto’s Open Infrastructures – Andrew R. Schrock: Afterword: Hackers and Makers are Ordinary.
