Makers and Doers

I have noticed this as a trend over the last 18 months or so. However I did not realize it was going "mainstream" enough to get a write up in Forbes. The following two paragraphs are lifted from the Forbes article.

YouTube's Household Hacker channel has had 8 million views for a video on how to charge an iPod with an onion. DIY, says YouTube's how-to community manager Sadia Harper, "is the new way of showing off. You used to be able to impress people by showing them things you've bought. Now it's more impressive to say, 'I made this sofa, I made this pot rack.'"

...

We can't get along without hackers and makers. Oil refining, woodworking, sewing machines, guns, scientific instruments and sporting goods have all been fundamentally changed by innovations from users, not producers. These "lead users," as MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls them, have had an outsized influence on the past and will continue to dictate the shape of things to come.