From Domestic Activities to Participation in "Social Network Markets": An Investigation on Online Knitting through the Case of Ravelry.

The needleworks (as knitting) always have had an ambiguous position from an economical perspective. Since a long time perceived as a domestic and women-oriented occupation, knitting has sometimes been considered as offering savings or even has been developped as a complementary source of income. But it also has been associated to otium - a legitimate leisure time, and seen as a relevant occupation for women, because it was supposed to prevent idelness, much more than considered as a kind of productive activity. For a long time, knitted garnments, as well as the knowledge and technics about knitting have also been passed on through and within local and familial networks. In our moderns societies, knitting is mostly perceived as a hobby and knitwears are mostly planned to gifts and donations. In that sense, they are a very good exemple of the social dimension in the valuation of goods. As knitting is not considered today a profitable activity, the value of knitwears essentialy lies in the qualities that are attributed to the knitter and to the relationship between people who are granted the gift and the knitter, eventually through an a appreciation of the process of making : time involved, ability, creativity.

If the value of knitwears then appears incommensurable, that of knitting ressources is not : needles, knitting patterns and yarns are valuable goods circulating on profitable markets. Gary Alan Fine, in his study on leisure’s subcultures, insist on the fact that people do not chose leisure activities according to personnal preference (or social characteristics) : the leisure organizations must provide relevant ressources (material or not) in order to attract and retain participants « Leisure organizations have as their primary goal the provisioning of satisfaction, of fun » (Fine, 1989). The current success of knitting is probably related to the development of new ways to provision fun to knitters.

Indeed, facing the expansion of ready-to-wear as well as the disaproval of feminists, we could have expected knitting as a declining activity. The knitting market, especially in France, has for long been dominated by few editor’s monopoly (Phildar, Pingouins, Bergere de France), offering to housewives a limited selection of products ready for use (patterns associated to low quality threads) for a reasonable price. Having few information on the characteristics of yarns, it was very difficult for knitters to escape from the offer of these producers : yarns and patterns were mostly distributed in franchised stores, constituting a limited choice for knitters. In United States, this model – a posteriori described as « proprietary » (White, 2010), was denounced in the 70’s. Amongst others people that were invested in the « Do It Yourself » counterculture, Elizabeth Zimmermann pleaded for decoupling the distribution of yarns and patterns. This involved the development of new models for the production and the distribution of knitting patterns and yarns. Among others, this meant that the market of threads could diversificate itself, and that it had to develop information on the characteristics and the qualities of yarns (yardage, fiber type, weight, etc. …). New kind of patterns were then needed for these new type of yarns, and more generally new ways of promoting and distributing patterns. If these changes on the markets of knitting ressources began before the spread of Internet, the web tools and new forms of markets have a strong contribution in their current development.

Ravelry.com is a web platform dedicated to knitting and crochet, launched by a four member team in 2007. It counts today 6 millions of user accounts. Ravelry provides strong databases of knitting patterns and other ressources (yarns, shops, designers). It functions as an project organizer, a social network for knitters and allows to make micro-transactions between users accounts. It has been described by Sal Humphreys, according to Potts & al. as an exemplary case of emerging social network markets (Potts, Cunningham et al. 2008). According to them, social network markets « reorganise the processes of exchange and innovation, for the avenues they provide for creative endeavour, and the hybridity of the rewards that are derived by different stakeholders”. Social networks as Ravelry, which are focusing on a specific, ressource-dependant activity, actually seem to be able to weave an original network of links, interactions and forms of transactions between heterogeneous participants. In this network, some interactions are monetized and most are not. However, not only consumers can become designers and sellers, but their contributions and interactions also are necessary and valuable informations.

How databases and network formats may changing the structure of social and economic relations of knitting practices ? By grounding our analysis on an original empirical material (Online observation and intervews with french Ravelry users) we will here show that the succes of Ravelry relies on its central role as a data organizer for a broader information infrastructure (Bowker et al. 2010) - including craft knowledge. It also relies on the ability of the database structure to provide answers to heterogeneous users profiles.  The impact of Internet on knitting market does not only concerns material ressources. We refer here to Fine on leisure once again « Although a bucket is sufficient for the collecting of mushrooms, it is not sufficient for "mushrooming." » : the distribution of knowledge about the leisure activity, opportunities for sociability, and the access to identity symbols are crucial elements. We will particularly develop here the way this online platform allows to highlight the ways that social mecanisms are involved in the valuation of goods, or in other words, how valuation activities appear here as form of social participation, as it was observed for situated learning in the context of  communities of practice (Lave & Wengler 1991).

In that sense, the web and Ravelry platform are actually transforming and extending the social scenes of knitting, from the docmestic domain towards public areas.