DIY Media: Creating, sharing and learning with new technologies - Edited by Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear

Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear (2010). DIY Media: Creating, sharing and learning with new technologies. 3rd ed. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.. 3,4,6-8,11, .

p3, "A focus on practice therefore includes the technical dimensions of the practice, as well as the insider perspectives on what it means to create something well (or well enough to be personally satisfying or to meet a given purpose."

p3, "The authors present their perspectives in ways that will provide newcomers or "strangers" to the practice with a sense of who the people are who participate in the practice, what is in it for them, and how they interact with others within this practice. At the same time, the authors' points of view engages those of other people participating in the practice whose views may vary on some points (e.g., around future trends and directions), thereby opening up possibilities for further reflection, debate and growth."

p4, "Observation alone is insufficient for understanding any culture."

p6, "More recently, DIY has been associated with a range of 1960s-1970s philosophies and countercultural trends, including anti-consumerist, anti-corporatist, environmental, self-reliance, self-actualization, New Age and subsistence values and practices."

p7, "With respect to self-publishing, punk amplified the orientation and scale of zines, or "cut and paste publishing". These short run magazines - "zines" for short - were originally typed texts that were cut and pasted by hand into booklet form and copied. Some writers date zines as an identifiable cultural form back to the 1940s."

p7, "Personal zines-perzines-are more recent, achieving "critical mass" in the mid-1980s. These zines grew out of the 1970s punk rock scene as fans put together "fanzines" about their favorite bands, focusing on biographical details, appearance dates and ven­ues, album reviews, and the like. According to a Wikipedia entry, the "burgeoning zine movement took up coverage of and promotion of the underground punk scenes, and significantly altered the way fans interacted with musicians" (no page). These zines were distributed during concerts or via networks of friends and fans. They soon evolved into more personalized locations of expression and their topics and themes ranged far beyond the punk rock scene. They nonetheless retained their roots in a DIY ethic, becoming a key "gateway to DIY culture" and generating "tutorial zines showing others how to make their own shirts, posters, magazines, books, food, etc." Increasingly, zines are published on the internet (sometimes referred to as "ezines"). Conventional paper zine production now also often involves computers in the production process, although today's zinesters typically retain the DIY ethos and the look and feel of original zines; for example, using computers to key and markup the text, then cutting and pasting texts and images onto each page after they have been printed, and then scanning or copying these pages as they are.Of course, punk subculture nurtured the development of DIY music, whereby legions of bands generated audiences, created fan bases, recorded their music and produced merchandise outside the ambit of corporate labels and the kinds of constraints imposed by "commercial considerations." This created "opportunities for smaller bands to get wider recognition and gain cult status through repetitive low-cost DIY touring":. Above all, perhaps, so far as subsequent DIY music media is concerned: 

punk taught people that you don't have to be virtuoso to . . . make music. Sim­ilarly, the computer-based music phenomenon has taught people they don't need instruments or other people to make music. Remix, as a particular form of that [DIY] principle, teaches people that anybody can comment on or interpret already existing music. Finally, as with punk, the expectation is not that you are remixing to secure immortality. The idea is that doing it yourself (DIY) is a worthwhile activity in and ofitself(Jacobson, p. 32, this volume)."

p11, "Eric Garland (2008), who is involved in the online measurement business, argues that redistributed content should be considered an important part of DIY media."