…I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell
Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015.
When reading “Why I Am Not a Maker”, I was reminded of a near-identical idea I’d heard elsewhere yet not even close to the same field and the final passage in particular really sealed said connection. The Comedy News segment “Last Week Tonight” held a piece on the dangers in American infrastructure eight years ago, where it was discussed that building and destroying infrastructure is appealing from a societal and political standpoint, actively maintaining it is almost never considered. The piece’s entire thesis is on the concept that the job done by ‘retainers’ is much less societally appreciated than ‘makers’ and thus America has let the things it’s supposed to retain (buildings and bridges) crumble. The phrase “you don’t get to cut a ribbon after routine repairs” is probably the quote that most encapsulates that idea.
Chachra’s work discusses that jobs in which people create something tangible are much more highly appreciated and further goes into the concept that the jobs of retaining, repairing and care-giving (such as teachers, doctors or stay-at-home parents) are things women are societally expected to do, at least in America. Gender norms both fuel and emanate from this unbalanced equivalency in the acceptance of specific jobs. I hadn’t really looked at the patterns in the big picture in that way before. I wonder if other cultures treat this dichotomy differently, or whether “makers” and “retainers” are split by some other societal differentiation (as opposed to gender).
In Digital Arts and Humanities, there’s a lot of ways “making” and “retaining” overlap, especially since the most obvious goal of a Digital Humanist (in my opinion) is archiving. It’s mostly retaining information however, it can also result in the creation of certain things, even if they’re digital instead of tangential.
