Do It Yourself sites (or DIY for short) have run their course. It seems that almost everyone now has posted a blog on creating, controlling and doing at home. From homespun wool to hacking the latest gaming system into a laptop, DIY-ers have sprouted across the internet like wild flowers. Or weeds, depending on your opinion.
DIY-ers are an interesting breed. For starters, most of us fit into that category of specialization. You and I know people who have specialized in something beyond our own understanding. What is interesting is the DIY-ers who have reached hyperspecialization. Their communication on their abilities breaks down and no longer can they communicate with people outside the loop. Traditionally, this is when people get careers relating to their hyperspecialization. Which puts the rest of us outside their sphere of communication.
This came to my attention a while ago when I realized I understood less and less of what my wife was talking about when she'd tell me how her day went. I tried. I tried very hard to understand it and it helped that I was fascinated by natural language processing. But there is a point which she crossed that I couldn't follow with a layman's perspective. The reverse is true for her understanding art. In fact, the masses don't understand visual arts (and haven't for the past 50 years) because of this hyperspecialization which resulted in the distancing of art from it's suckle: the community.
For several months, I tried to approach this system in painting. I used departmentally specific symbols which communicated only to those within fields outside of the art community. The piece was abuot disfunction in communication. Ironically, because it was about miscommunication, it was a misrepresented body of work and being misread was taken down prematurely.
But returning to DIY-ers, I noticed that because of Web 2.0 models DIY communities had taken the place of hobbist communities and physical social groups. Someone commented the other day that if you truly wanted to become an attorney in California, all you needed was to study the information to pass the bar online and then pass the test. There is no requirement for law school. Save yourself some money: teach yourself online! So, why doesn't it work like that?
I have a couple theories. First, the internet has become too large. According to Google, Inc, during the year of 2005 the number of websites surpassed 8.5 billion. Web 2.0 platform feeds that number. This surplus of information requires a precision of search which can't be reached with outdated search algorithms. Personally, I'd like to see NLP taken beyond the theoretically academic institutions into a processing locale where it could make a difference in this area.
Second theory: learning from DIY-ers requires you to already be "in the know." There are dozens of projects I want to do (anyone know how to make a LCD laptop monitor into something worthwhile?) which I can't do because studying online help guides makes about as much sense as stereo instructions. This is really the point of the beast - DIY is only as helpful as what you already learned. Stereo instructions mean a great deal to someone who knows audio equipment, but where did they attain that information?
I decided to mimic the DIY community by documenting my process of learning skills which I have wanted to learn: java, linux, etc. The list will grow as I learn and learn what other people around me know. But there's one important catch: I need to learn it from someone I know, one-on-one. If I fail miserably... well, maybe I wasn't meant to learn something. The art project is to analyze the social interaction between teacher and learner - between the experience of learning and the experience of adapting to new information. It is very similar to my social art project on the Battleguard group. My art experiences social processes. I will post documentation on this work.
- ‹ previous
- 228 of 798
- next ›