In her book Life on the Screen (1995), Sherry Turkle discusses the concept of DIY when it comes to problem solving in code projects and workspace productivity. She advocates the “tinkerer style” of programming as a valid and little-studied alternative to what she calls the conventional structured “planner” approach. In this style of coding, the programmer works without exhaustive preliminary specification and instead opts for a step-by-step process of growth and re-evaluation. In his essay “Epistemological Pluralism,” Turkle writes: “The handyman resembles the painter who stands back between brushstrokes, looks at the canvas, and only after this contemplation decides what to do next.” [20] DIY positions itself well as the epistemology of how we get to know the world. It also fits well and has been used in most, if not all, of the “postal” posts that occurred in and after the 1960s. However, while I come across this term in the vernacular, as it is used in hundreds of texts to discuss art, remix, literature, poetic forms, music, fashion, subcultural movements, leadership, research methods, etc. I don`t get the impression that most of the uses are epistemological. In a more mundane sense, it`s a description or even a justification for a particular patchwork approach, where things are patched together, inserted, and layered to find meaning, and what we`ve used before is reused in new ways, all terms that fit well with the remix. There is a persistent notion that DIY also involves using what`s at hand, which we might associate with DIY practices, but is not limited to them (see entry in this volume). As far as Derrida is concerned, if one accepts the way in which culture and knowledge are staged, understood or understood, everything could be considered tinkering (1978, p. 365). Let`s take a closer look at the idea of DIY as an action. Bricolage emerged in qualitative sociology and communication sciences during the interpretative turn of the 1990s to capture various processes of interpretive methods.
In the 2000s, as copy/copy/paste associated with digital media became easier, DIY combines many other concepts to describe different practices and products associated with remix culture. In the following, I discuss DIY as epistemology, action and product. It`s a conscious decision to tie the concept more closely to the academic process of creating meaning, where we scientists spend a lot of time thinking about how we get to know things and then tell the world what we know. Specifically, this entry stems from my own use of DIY, pastiche, fragmented storytelling, and remix as inspiration to experiment with tools and techniques more in tune with the complexity of 21st century cultural formations. One may notice my strong tendency to talk about interpretive research methods to work through the concept, which is the direct result of my own tinkering with my own training and the available resources that result from it. For a different breakdown of the handyman as an agent and DIY as an action, I refer readers to Johnson`s excellent Handyman and DIY: From metaphor to universal concept (2012). After Lévi-Strauss brought the word to anthropologists in the 1960s, it was taken up by many others to discuss the production of knowledge more generally in the context of the radicalization of the sciences of the time. Derrida, for example, discussed the concept at length in a 1966 lecture, praising and criticizing Levi-Strauss`s concept, saying: “If one calls DIY the need to borrow one`s concepts from the text of a more or less coherent or ruined heritage, it must be said that every discourse is tinkering” (1978, p.
285). If we follow this interpretation, the DIY is similar, but different from the closely related actions of remixing and improvisation. Weick (1995) explains: The product of academic work is different from other types of DIY. Although Kincheloe views DIY as a hallmark of interpretive qualitative research (2001, 2005), most of what we recognize as DIY is only visible to others as a genre or format of research presentation. In this sense, DIY as a product is the unique representation of collage, assembly, composite, fragmented or laminated that emerges from the process of interpretive or postmodern investigation. Otherwise, DIY becomes an explanation, which is not DIY in itself. This is an important distinction. If you consider it a keyword in remix studies, it is the use of all available funds or anything that is available that makes DIY relevant to us. More precisely, according to Louridas (1999), the key element of levi-Strauss`s conceptualization above is that the materials available to think or act are finite, heterogeneous and limited to those that are random or incidental without movement (“foreign” in the English translation above). The following passage by Levi Strauss illustrates this: In my own work, I have worked to find a vocabulary that effectively disrupts the predominance of traditional textbook models for social science methods, finding visual tools to unlearn linearity and orientation toward individuals and objects. In my own academic ethnographic writings, I have produced fragmented narratives, used multiple fonts to highlight different voices, presented alternative endings, and presented texts in a non-linear format. This is in fact a common practice in interpretative qualitative survey circles.
Nevertheless, I am impressed by how “linear arguments constructed in traditional forms still give us today a false sense of certainty about the solidity or unity of our interpretations, as well as how we arrive at these interpretations” (Markham, 2005, p. 17). The Internet offers the possibility of staging DIY in a way that was not possible before. I and maybe others have called this remix DIY, although it`s not universal. However, this is an interesting endpoint to conclude, as there might be a reason to conceptually combine these terms more fully to analyze their singularities and overlaps. In the field of qualitative investigation, Kincheloe (2001, 2005), echoing Denzin & Lincoln (2000), combines this state of readiness with the development of a critical consciousness that allows researchers to recognize and work on situations and relationships of complexity. As Kincheloe refines his reasoning over time, we can see a shift from an emphasis on serendipity stemming from multidisciplinarity (2001) to a change that actively opposes monological knowledge. In his later argument (2005), Kincheloe describes: “In its hard work in the field of complexity, DIY views research methods more actively than passively, which means that we actively build our research methods from the available tools, rather than passively obtaining the `right` universally applicable methods” (p. 324).
Craftsmanship in the sense of Lévi-Strauss is therefore not only about using what is at hand, but about critical, multi-perspective and reflexive cognition.
