Making is Connecting by David Gauntlett

David Gauntlett (2011). Making is Connecting. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 

p10, 'Marshall McLuhan's famous statement that 'the medium is the message' can be taking in various ways...'

p11, 'As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer observed in the 1940s, and as many critics have noted since, modern capitalism succeeds not by menacing us, or dramatically crushing our will on the industrial wheel, but by encouraging us to enjoy a flow of convenient, cheerful stuff, purchased from shops, which gives us a feeling of satisfaction, if not happiness.'

p11, 'In Freud, a fetish is basically about unconsciously overcoming anxiety through attachment to particular objects.'

p14, (Quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Perennial, 1997, p8.) 'Creativity, at least as I define it in this book, is a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines are what creativity is all about.'

p14, (ibid, p6) 'According to this view, creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a personal who brings novelty to the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognise and validate the innovation.'

p15, (ibid) 'Just as the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it, so creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and implement them.

p16, (Quote from David Gauntlett, Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences, London: Routledge, 2007. p19) 'You could argue endlessly, if you wanted to be rather trivial, about whether one thing 'is' and another thing 'is not' creative. But that's not really the point. The point is widely dispersed and, more importantly, is one of the most central aspects of being human.'

p17, 'In this way of looking at it, creativity is about breaking new ground, but internally: the sense of going somewhere, doing something that you've not done before. This might lead to fruits which others can appreciate, but those may be secondary to the process of creativity itself, which is best identified from within.'

p19, 'Why is everyday creativity important? - Because I feel that it's incredibly important - important for society - and therefore political.'

p19, 'You may not that my examples... are not the absolute essentials of life - people can survive without silly entertainment, flowers, gloves, or songs if they have to. But it is the fact that people have made the choice - to make something themselves rather than just consume what's given by the big suppliers - that is significant.'

p23, 'One way to avoid this trap is to reject the positioning of 'art' as superior, and instead to regard its stance as unnecessarily pretentious and exclusive, and therefore rather silly, in comparison to the more earthy, engaged spirit of craft.'

p23, (quote from Richard Sennet's The Craftsman, London: Allen Lane 2008, p7) 'The craftsperson does not do the thinking and then move on to the mechanical act of making: on the contrary, making is part of thinking, and he adds, feeling; and thinking and feeling are part of making.' 

p25, 'In particular, craft seems to be about a drive to make and share things, no matter what anyone says.'

p28, 'For Ruskin, financial wealth which does not contribute to the stock of human happiness is no wealth at all.'

p29, 'Ruskin admires the 'savagery' and 'rudeness' of the Gothic style, not for a masculine tough reason, bu because he sees it as the loving embrace of humanity's imperfections.'

p30, (Quote from John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic, in Unto This Last and Other Writings, edited by Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 1997), p83) 'Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame.'

p43, 'The artist should be humble, engaged with the everyday and willing to make things themselves - to get their hands dirty as it were.'

p43, 'Today, the category of 'artist' is even more sharply removed from everyday creative practices, and often seems to be based on having the 'right' kind of art education, the necessary fashionable artworld connections, and pretentious way of talking about things. Until quite recently, this used to be deeply frustrating for creative people who did not happen to be part of the artworld in-crowd, because they were therefore denied the ability to share their work with others.'

p44, 'So we do not have to choose between the individual or the collective: rather, a diverse community of individual voices offers a satisfying combined solution.'