AMPLIFIED LEICESTER: MAKING IS CONNECTING

David Gauntlett

It's the last Wednesday of the month, so I'm at Phoenix Square Film & DigitalMedia Centre, for the regular meeting of Amplified Leicester. I've missed the last two meetings, so I'm glad to be back in the swing of things (especially as I'm convening the panel for the next session, at the end of March). This is the first of Amplified's evening session to be fully subscribed: 70 people have registered on Eventbrite.

The speaker is David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster (and a local Leicester lad). He's the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007), which was shortlisted for the Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year Award, and Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He produces the popular website about media and creativity in everyday life, theory.org.uk. There's also a great website dedicated to Making is Believing, which will reward repeated visits.

Through making things, people engage with the world and create connections with each other. Both online and offline, we see that people want to make their mark on the world, and to make connections. David Gauntlett discusses the rise of a "making-and-doing" culture, where people are rejecting traditional methods of teaching and learning and more passive forms of engaging with the world, such as television, and developing their own skills ans making their own entertainment.

David's talk is easy-going and professional in equal parts, displaying a level of presentation skills which show someone totally at home with the technology (maybe I'm thinking here about how I'll come over next time *gulp*). He made what, to some, may be an obvious point, but I still think worth making: that creativity didn't start with the world wide web, that the creativity we enjoy and value online is part of a continuum, both historically (he made nice extended references to John Ruskin and William Morris) and socially (regarding the kind of creativity that goes on under the radar and has often been identified with the activity of women).

This is all meat and drink to me, in keeping with the discussion of creativity in which I've been immersed while tutoring the Open University third-level (honours) linguistics course, The Art of English. I love it when the different threads in my life join up like this.

I get a moment at the the end to trail the panel I'm convening for next month's session, on Amplified Communities of Faith or Belief. I leave out copies of the Council of Faiths flyer with all our social media details on it and set a little homework - that those interested in coming to our session check out what we're doing with social media already and think of ways we could improve on it.

As we're leaving the session, Richard Hopper (Secretary of Leicester Secular Society, who'll be on the panel next month) tells me that William Morris gave his first public lecture in the Secular Hall on Humberstone Gate. Nice one.