Make Magazine

= the first magazine and media brand devoted entirely to makers and the maker movement and the powerful combination of open source hardware + personal fabrication tools + connected makers

Background

URL = http://makezine.com/

"Open Source Hardware has a loud and passionate following in the hobbyist community. In 2005, O'Reilly Media began publishing Make magazine, a quarterly how-to guide for all sorts of engineering and science projects. Make now has more than 100,000 subscribers and has spawned events known as Maker Faires, which are a cross between souped-up science fairs and high-tech craft shows. Last spring, 65,000 professionals and amateurs flocked to the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire to demonstrate projects that ranged from arts and crafts to engineering and science--and many that blurred the boundaries. And as they showed off their creations, attendees also shared ideas and met potential collaborators.

Around the time that Make was getting off the ground, Eric Wilhelm '99, SM '01, PhD '04, launched the Instructables website, which provides a template for step-by-step instructions that lets people document their engineering projects online. Since its users are allowed to comment on other people's projects, Instructables has created a vibrant community of technology enthusiasts who share information on building just about anything--including a computer mouse made from an actual dead mouse, an eight-foot-long match, and biodiesel fuel." (http://www.technologyreview.com/article/21495/page3/)

Discussion

Make Magazine and the legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog

Sara Tocchetti:

"By being presented at OSCON, the magazine was placed at the center of the vast community of IT professionals gathered around O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly and Associates was founded as an IT consulting firm, in 1978. The Boston-based company’s first success came in 1992 with the publication of The Whole Internet: User’s Guide and Catalog. Its story is narrated in a book entitled Creating Consumer Evangelists (McConnell and Huba, 2003). The authors describe how several months before the book was released, Brian Erwin, founder of the media office of the Sierra Club – the most influential US environmental organization – was hired as director of O’Reilly public relations. Erwin took over the promotion of the book by using the techniques of communication he had developed at the Sierra Club (Young, 2008). In the book a quote from O’Reilly explains:

“While Brian got us to think about activism we were on very fertile ground because we were already seeing ourselves as a voice of a community. We were writing the books for a class of people we knew really well because we were them” (McConnell and Huba, 2003, p.109).

The Whole Internet became the most popular book educating more than one million readers about the revolutionary potential of the Internet. Its success provided O’Reilly and Associates with the financial leverage to become O’Reilly Media. In 2010 the company owned twenty-four percent of what is estimated to be a four-hundred millions dollar market (Chafkin, 2010), selling each year more than one and a half million IT manuals and books worldwide (Hendrikson, 2011). Unsurprisingly the CEO’s biographical traits and the company’s aims are portrayed as identical. On the company website, O’Reilly is described as ‘a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, honing in on the technology trends that really matter and galvanizing their adoption by amplifying “faint signals”from the “alpha geeks”’ (O’Reilly Media Inc. 2012a and 2012b). The book not only symbolizes the entrepreneurial evangelism of O’Reilly Media (O’Reilly Media Inc. 2012b), but also the first expression of the O’Reilly homage to “Steward Brand and crew” (O’Reilly, 2006). In a post published in the O’Reilly Radar [4] to publicize an event co-hosted by Fred Turner and Steward Brand, O’Reilly wrote: “A huge amount of the O’Reilly sensibility, a mix of practicality and idealism, was learned from the Whole Earth Catalog” (O’Reilly, 2006). More importantly in the same post O’Reilly endorses this legacy towards a future: “And of course, the Whole Earth Catalog is one of the wellsprings of the modern DIY movement, for which Make magazine is now carrying the torch” (O’Reilly, 2006). Turner’s analysis of the Catalog as a network forum that “entrepreneurially linking[ed] the countercultural and technological communities” (Turner, 2006, p. 101), is still very useful to understand why O’Reilly proudly designates MAKE as its ardent descendant.

As Turner himself summarizes in the event description:

- “Over forty years, they [Steward Brand and his colleagues] transformed American notions of technology and particularly, of computers. They shaped the defining notions of our digital world, including ‘personal’ computing, virtual community, and the vision of cyberspace as an electronic frontier. [...] And in the process, they transformed the ideals of the generation of 1968 into a deeply optimistic vision of the social potential of digital technologies” (O’Reilly, 2006).

The inscription of MAKE as part of the Catalog legacy is a symbolic move inviting members of the O’Reilly Media community of IT professionals to revisit or discover their relation to information technologies through the Catalog, while at the same time constituting MAKE as a forum to celebrate such legacy." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-2/peer-reviewed-papers/diybiologists-as-makers/)

More Information

1. Maker Movement
2. Twitter: @make