A few years ago, I wrote this short article for Technology and Culture about the Mythbusters TV show. It’s a meditation on what made that show fun for me (and others, I presume), which was that it showed the joy of making and doing things without a clear productive goal in mind. Officially, technology is about accomplishing things– it’s supposed to be instrumental. But there is a lot about making and inventing that overflows those bounds. I think Mythbusters was ultimately about a maker’s dreamworld of doing things for the hell of it.
The article can be found on JStore here: UNGER, DAVID S. “‘MythBusters’ and the Joy of Technology.” Technology and Culture, vol. 55, no. 2, 2014, pp. 482–485. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24468916.
Or you could read it in this window: