Today I was in the kitchen, cleaning up after having made some bread.
My mother was making a pitcher of iced tea. I noticed that unlike usual, she added something. So I asked her “what’s up with that?” and after singing this to amuse myself, she answered that she added another type of tea to the brew to enhance the flavor.
I asked how she came to the decision to do such a thing. She then told me a brief, but interesting, story about a day in which she didn’t have quite enough of the Tedley bags she usually uses for iced tea, but she noticed that I had some orange infused specialty tea sitting on the counter, so she threw a bag of it in, and she liked the flavor.
I am not going to go to a super-deep level and start talking about how her tea brewing literacy informed her that she had a need for X amount of tea, but her cooking/brewing experiences taught her that creative innovation could lead to mutation and perhaps a fantastic revised product. But I think I could.
So I looked into the sink, at what I was cleaning up. I had an extra measuring spoon, because I chose, just at random, to throw some fresh cracked black pepper into the bread. I made the decision because the bread was meant to be for ham sandwiches, and I thought the extra flavor would be interesting (it was). Reread previous paragraph, subbing bread making for brewing as needed.
In my current research, I am trying to make a case for people– specifically video game players– “making” something that is best referred to as progress. I am in the process of linking this back to the idea of techne (a concept I love so much that I named one of my characters “Techne”), but as I think about it, I don’t know that the argument I’m trying to make (there that word is again) is as difficult as some make (again) out to be.
In the techne– crafting, artisan– sense of things, one could fairly consistently claim that we “make” most things. I’m making a blog post as I type. You’re making a connection reading this. You’re making– in a more abstract sense– an opinion of my argument. You make yourself presentable before you go outside, you make a plan to go where you’re going, etc.
I remember being taught that humanity is different from other mammals for the simple reason that we use tools.
And why do we use tools?
To make things.
Almost everything we do involves tools.
We make almost everything.
I’m intrigued by how this will evolve, but that’s where I am today. I’m making a case.
-Phill