• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.95-133
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• 2018

Since the beginning of the millennium, 'Maker Movement' has been active throughout the world. Today, there is a maker fair every year in major cities of the world including Seoul, and the number of attendees is increasing day by day, so it can be seen as a kind of maker 'phenomenon'. The positive implication of the maker's movement is that it attempts to break down the monopoly of manufacturing and to restore the rights and capabilities of citizens as makers. Today, highly developed industrial capitalism has a tendency to structurally paralyse citizens, to tie their hands and feet, and to degenerate into consuming entities only. Therefore, it can be said that the maker movement has structural tensions in the relationship of neoliberal manufacturing culture. This study is an attempt to actively interpret the maker movement in terms of "critical making". The maker movement can trace its origins to "counterculture" and "new communalism" that emerged in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, there is criticism that the maker movement can fall into another technology utopianism and function as an area of consumer society, and mobilize it in the direction of activating consumerism. Although the maker's movement is amorphous due to its characteristics and it is currently in progress, it is difficult to make crude definition yet. However, as the citizens who have been defined only as consumers of science and technology, are newly emerging as producers of makers, there have been great changes in the topography of science and technology and civil society. So the scientific implication of the maker movement is great in that it shows the possibility of causing it.