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originally published in a slightly-abridged fashion earlier this year in Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE, Vol. 27, No. 2. (2005), pp. 96-96

Earlier this year, O’Reilly Publishing introduced a new quarterly publication called Make. Addressing his readers, editor and publisher Dale Dougherty wrote, “More than mere consumers of technology, we are makers, adapting technology to our needs and integrating it into our lives. Some of us are born makers and others, like me, become makers almost without realizing it…Becoming a maker is a lot like becoming a better cook-you can follow or improvise upon the work of experts.”

In some ways, the debut of Make points toward what seems a broader trend in the world of contemporary technology, the growing resurgence of individuals who don’t fit into traditional categories of “producer” or “user.” A recent Demos report pointed in a similar direction, coining the term “Pro-Am” to refer to “innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards” who, the authors argue, “could have a huge influence on the shape of society in the next two decades”.¹

As historians of technology, we might be forgiven for not quite buying into the hype; while a distinct feature of the contemporary landscape, Dougherty’s “makers” occupy the same social space as earlier individuals labeled as hackers, tinkerers, amateurs, hobbyists or enthusiasts. In the early days of wireless telegraphy, skilled amateurs with crystal radio sets (traditionally cast as “boy operators”) ranged through the ether, and once the medium had shifted to voice and music broadcasts, hobbyists known as “dx-ers” (and later, “hams”) tinkered with their radio sets to receive signals from around the country and around the world.² Audiophiles have pushed the boundaries of both their hi-fi stereos and their own ears in their quest for the purest sound.³ Outside the realm of information technology, early rural automobile owners reconfigured their Model Ts to serve as everything from plows to washing machines, foreshadowing hot rod culture by decades (albeit in a more obviously productive way than today’s “pimped rides” tricked out with chrome wheels, LCD screens and neon lighting).⁴ And, of course, amateurs and tinkerers are particularly relevant to readers of this journal, as the early days of personal computing were dominated by enthusiastic hobbyists concentrated in groups like the famed Homebrew Computer Club, and vibrant communities persist to this day around “case-modding” and other maker activities.⁵

So, what drives these amateurs? In her dissertation on ham radio hobbyists, Kristen Haring uses the concept of “technical identity” to describe their uniquely intimate relationship with their rigs. This relationship manifests in tinkering, which Haring describes as a “productive [form] of leisure” with an active technical component. As an analytic category, however, tinkering reaches far beyond her radio hams.⁶ If technological literacy can be defined as the knowledge of how to use a given technology, then it might be said that tinkerers possess a certain technological fluency, the ability not only to read meanings of the technology (i.e. follow an instruction manual), but also to speak new ones. Such makers - in this case, Dougherty’s phrase seems particularly apt - don’t simply draw on black-boxed knowledge; they unpack and rewrite it to suit their whims.

More than mere curiosities, these individuals throw into sharp relief our understanding of the relationship between technology and people. By this point, it’s uncontroversial to argue that the invention of a technology requires the simultaneous manufacture of a physical artifact and knowledge about its meaning and use, but this “social construction of technology” perspective raises a thorny issue: in theory, every user of a technology is able to reinvent it at her pleasure, yet few do. Why are most technologies relatively stable?

One answer to this question is that theory doesn’t map entirely onto reality; it takes material and social resources to alter what Thomas Hughes called the “momentum” of a given technology, and both come in limited supply. The means of production for physical things and knowledge about those artifacts are (to varying degrees) held in the hands of a relatively small minority, and the presence of Dougherty’s makers highlights the issues of identity and expertise that are bound up with this process.

Amateurs by definition occupy a gray area, complicating our understanding of “producer” and “user” or “work” and “leisure” as distinct categories. On the one hand, they act like experts, building up and sharing both codified and tacit knowledge and quite literally making (and remaking) technology; at the same time (as Dougherty wrote in Make) they explicitly self-identify as non-professional, marking off their identity in terms of “tinkering” with or “hacking” already-created technologies rather than crafting them from whole cloth.

We might better understand the position of amateurs by importing some theory from a neighboring discipline; for the past two decades, scholars of the unfortunately-acronymed “public understanding of science” (PUS) have worked to understand the relationship between scientific experts (who are able to create new scientific knowledge) and non-expert laypeople (who aren’t). Their conclusion? It’s not necessarily that a layperson is constitutionally unable to engage in scientific knowledge production, but rather that he or she wouldn’t be taken seriously as part of the discussion; the ability to legitimately produce knowledge is determined by factors more social than innate.

In the case of science, the expert community is the only game in town; hobbyists haven’t played a prominent role in scientific knowledge production since the professionalization of science during the 19th century. Though also bound up with questions of knowledge-production, the case of technology is slightly different. Science is seen as a forward march toward a single natural truth, while differences of opinion about technology use are generally more tolerable; hence the pressures on dissenting voices in science are much greater than the same social pressures on tinkerers who might crack open a majority-held, black-boxed technological frame. In short, there’s space to tinker because the ontological stakes are lower.

Tinkering has most often been described as a solitary activity, and studies of tinkerers like Haring’s hams or Douglas’ dx-ers often center on the relationship between an individual’s tinkering and his self-identity, particularly as it relates to the renegotiation of masculinity in the 20th century. While valuable, this perspective runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees, overlooking the important role played by communities in sharing information and defining the normative boundaries of tinkering.

One canonical example of such a hobbyist community can be found in the early days of computing. In their actively social engagement with technology, many computer enthusiasts adhered to what Steven Levy calls the “Hacker Ethic.” The culture of early computer enthusiasts and hobbyists, Levy writes, was based around “a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost - to improve the machines, and to improve the world.” For Levy, this ethic was neatly encapsulated in the verb “to hack,” the act of finding an elegant solution to a problem using the technological tools at hand. Sherry Turkle comes to a similar conclusion, explaining that “a central organizing theme in hacker culture…is ‘The Hack.’ It is the holy grail.” For both Levy and Turkle, “hacking” goes beyond mere tinkering in its aesthetic appreciation of the elegance and beauty of a particular bit of tinkering, as well as its normative assertion that to hack is fundamentally good, and that it is even better to share your hacks with others.⁷

One of the central ironies in the recent history of computing is that such hacking, initially seen with “grudging admiration” through the 1960’s and 1970’s as a valuable (if eccentric) source of creativity and innovation, has become synonymous with criminal activity. What happened? Philosopher Helen Nissenbaum has explored this transition, offering the insight that the change doesn’t lay with the hackers themselves, but rather their cultural context. The “Hacker Ethic” of openness and sharing clashed with a growing corporate reliance on information technology and the attendant politics of information as property, and in the harsh light of the latter computer hackers were reframed from heroes to hooligans.⁸

The subject of amateurs and technology is becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary culture, as the boundaries between producer and consumer continue to blur. “User-centered design” is a hot new trend. Sociologists and businesspeople alike are trying to figure out how to understand open source software communities, whose participants complicate even the most sophisticated understanding of what constitutes an amateur. A panel at last year’s SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems conference addressed the topic from an explicitly pragmatic angle, offering a discussion of “Design for Hackability.” And when O’Reilly - the go-to publisher of programming reference books - starts publishing a quarterly magazine aimed directly at hackers and tinkerers, you know that something’s up.

So why now? Why are “makers” or “Pro-Ams” gaining prominence in this particular moment? While the question needs much more exploration, a tentative answer might be found in the centrality of information and computing technology to our lives - while a hot rod enthusiast needs an auto shop full of tools in order to “hack” his car, the only material tool needed by an open-source coder is a common desktop computer. It seems that with the rise of software-driven information technology comes a lowering of the material constraints on tinkering, at the same time that new media like the Web have facilitated communication and community-formation among hobbyists. For historians of technology, the growing visibility of contemporary amateurs means that the very issues of authority, identity and expertise that lie at the center of our work are thrust to the forefront of popular discourse; we could do far worse than to seize the opportunity and join the discussion.

¹ C. Leadbeater and P. Miller, “The Pro-Am Revolution. How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society,” Demos, 2004.

² S. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, Ch. 6; Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ‘N’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern, Times Books, 1999, Ch. 3.

³ Joseph O’Connell, “The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear: High End Audio and the Evolutionary Model of Technology,” Technology and Culture 33, no. 1 (1992).

⁴ R. Kline and T. Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture vol. 37, 1996.

⁵ B. Simon, “Geek Chic: Machine Aesthetics, The Materiality of Information and the Hardcore Gamer,” Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, 2004.

⁶ Kristen Haring, “Technical Identity in the Age of Electronics,” Dissertation, Harvard University, 2002.

⁷ S. Levy, Hackers, Dell Publishing, 1984; S. Turkle, The Second Self : Computers and the Human Spirit, Simon and Schuster, 1984.

⁸ H. Nissenbaum, “Hackers and the Contested Ontology of Cyberspace,” New Media & Society vol. 6, no. 2, 2004.