creativity/machine

Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, by Kristen Haring, is a new book out on MIT Press, found via Anne’s del.icio.us links.
From the blurb/summary:

Ham radio required solitary tinkering with sophisticated electronics equipment, often isolated from domestic activities in a “radio shack,” yet the hobby thrived on fraternal interaction. Conversations on the air grew into friendships, and hams gathered in clubs or met informally for “eyeball contacts.” Within this community, hobbyists developed distinct values and practices with regard to radio, creating a particular “technical culture.”

Sounds familiar in the light of hacker culture, open source, social software, and so on ad infinitum, no?

Without wanting to just impose patterns derived from contemporary culture onto history, I’ve been very interested lately in the way that emergent amateur cultures of (cultural) production have been articulated with technological change in a whole heap of contexts. I’m also increasingly interested in the articulation of the hacker ethic (or, the ‘tinkering’ discussed by Haring in the book) with masculinity. Looking through the gender+tech lens, it’s interesting to compare the history of ham radio and the personal computer with the domestication of, say, the gramophone or my old favourite, the camera. So this is one for next year - oops, I mean post-phd this year. It’s started already and slowly grinding into gear.

Happy New Year, by the way!

Art quilt project by Terese Agnew:

Portrait of a Textile Worker makes one person among millions of unseen workers visible. Her image was constructed with thirty thousand clothing labels stitched together over two years. The idea came from a simple observation. One day while shopping in a department store I noticed huge signs everywhere — Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Kathy Lee and so on. They were all proper names. I’d recently met two garment workers and realized that by contrast, their identity was rarely thought of and often deliberately hidden. That anonymity could be undone by assembling a view of one worker using the well-known names on apparel she produced. The portrait is based on a photograph of a young textile worker in Bangladesh by Charles Kernaghan.