The Common Craft Show is a monthly series of short explanatory videos produced by Lee and Sachi LeFever, available on blip.tv and Youtube.com. Their stated goal is to introduce simple technological tools using everyday English and a charming low-tech presentation format they call “paperworks.” In addition to the “Wikis in Plain English” program I’ve included here, others have explained social networks, social bookmarking, RSS, and, in the most recent month, a departure into eco-politics with an introduction to CFL light bulbs. The popularity of the Common Craft format has led to work-for-hire producing paperworks that introduce corporate products like PRWeb and Google Docs. This application of DIY practice to the “educational” or “lifestyle” genres, as well as the prominence of amateur-created (or amateur-seeming) “how-to” and “maker” video- and text-blogs highlights yet again what John Hartley has called the “transmodern” quality of contemporary media practices, where the line between audience and polity blurs, and postmodern and pre-modern notions of citizenship are joined. As the uses of television migrate to the Internet, auto-didacticism is emerging as a core feature of the modern wiki-life, and—if I may continue riffing on Dr. Hartley—learning is no longer simply a precursor to leading, managing, or joining society, it is of a piece with keeping up with the routines and procedures necessary to stay “in the flow,” especially as concerns the maintenance of online work practice and identity. It’s notable that Common Craft productions are not teaching content in the traditional sense--form and canon or, in Rancière’s formulation, interpreting knowledge to ignorance—-rather they present interpretations of tools, supplying technique, in other words, to audiences of various knowledge regimes but each poised, despite their differences, to read, learn, and do in one motion. This is an ideology nicely distilled in the catchphrase found in every Common Craft show: “there is a better way.” I don’t know if I’ve heard a better slogan for the responsibilities and anxieties that have taken on new intensity in the era of post-industrial labor.