Paper 5 -
New media, New Craft?

Bailey Newton-Browne.

New media, New craft is a paper written by Andrew Richardson to discuss the differences or rather, similarities between an old craft such as carpentry or even building houses and farming and the nowadays “craft”, programming and coding.

This paper raises some rather interesting outlooks and certainly opened my mind to how important coding is in today’s society. It goes over some very basic outlines that, in a different age, carpentry was imperative to the way of survival and ridiculously important, whereas nowadays, companies and stores require websites and various online interfaces in order to sell their products and therefore, coding and programming is a form of craft, something you can master in.

In class, me and my coursemate, Lewis, searched Google for the original definition of “Craft.”

Craft noun
1. 1.
an activity involving skill in making things by hand.

This lead to a discussion in class that led to our evaluation of this whole concept. We believed that Coding and programming belonged as a craft, not just an activity. We didn’t like the idea of being part of something so big and recognised and highly sought after and it not being considered a craft/skill or even art.

They say in the paper that they wanted to not just consider Programming a craft but to also distinguish the definition between materials and the artist. They say you need to broaden your horizons on the term “Arts and crafts.” To conclude, I believe that this paper had an excellent point to make and it made me and my class mates really open up and talk to one another, it served as a really good icebreaker because it involved our collected craft, media, coding and programming. It drew us together on something we were all related to. I loved this paper.