DIY citizenship: Critical making and social media

TLDR: Navigating the possibilities and challenges of digital making is a diverse cadre of scholars, artists, and activists who consider how and when individuals and communities participate in shaping, changing, and reconstructing selves, worlds, and environments in creative ways that challenge the status quo and normative understandings of ‘how things must be’.

Abstract: The growth of contemporary participatory culture has largely come to seem, through both scholarly research and the popular press, as a concomitant of new media’s rise to prominence. Certainly, new media affordances have been shown, for instance, to help increase civic participation, diversify the public sphere, and bypass traditional media gatekeepers in crucial ways. Yet, as the editors of this important collection point out, participatory culture’s origins precede the rise of new media, taking its roots instead in the do-it-yourself (DIY) counterculture of the 1960s and the punk and alternative music zine subcultures of the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, while new media have been shown to facilitate cultural participation and lessen some social differences, critical research has also suggested that digital media tools often reflect the neoliberal values of the corporations that create and distribute them, complicating their use by those who seek to question or change those values. Similarly, legacy media’s widespread appropriation of new media affordances has blurred the boundaries between alternative and mainstream media in ways that complicate both of their roles in the public sphere. These historical and critical perspectives animate the 28 chapters in this insightfully edited volume on the possibilities and challenges of digital making. Although diverse in viewpoints and focus, these inquiries and explorations share two primary theoretical premises: John Hartley’s notion of a DIY citizen as an agentive creator of identity and critical making as an activity for intervening in the systems of power and reflecting on our experiences of the material world. Together, these concepts form, the editors assert, the basis of a framework for DIY citizenship that “invites us to consider how and when individuals and communities participate in shaping, changing, and reconstructing selves, worlds, and environments in creative ways that challenge the status quo and normative understandings of ‘how things must be’”(p. 5). Navigating those possibilities in this collection is a diverse cadre of scholars, artists, and activists. Their examinations of varied objects of study creatively blend a range of theories and methods, from qualitative analyses of fan blogging and ethnomethodological considerations of alternative media to arguments for incorporating a DIY pedagogy into primary education and for seeing collaborative documentary making as a form of