Lessons from zines

I’ve been fascinated through my years as a blogger by the parallels that can be drawn between the punky DIY Make Your Own Media fanzine movements that ran from the late 1970s through the 1990s and the modern internet of blogs and social networks and all that Jazz.

Gutenberg, unwitting grandfather of the zine revolution

The big connection is technological developments making the means of duplication accessible to a significantly larger number of people than before. The obvious starting point would be Johannes Gutenberg and his Movable Type printing press which took the manufacture of books out of the monks’ scriptorium and heralded a world of mass produced books. This is rightly seen as a quantumn leap in media distribution as it suddenly meant anyone with a piece of machinery and the knowledge to use it could print multiple copies of a book.

While I’d never heard of Gutenberg at the time the importance of this hit me around the age of eight. I remember the teacher was handing out books for the class to read together and was amazed that they were all the same, not just in content but in appearance. Page 44 of my friend’s copy was identical to page 44 of mine. This seemed quite revolutionary to me. A book, something I’d been brought up to believe was a sacred thing to be treasured and loved, was merely a copy. A machine had obviously produced them. But this didn’t reduce the importance of the book to me – it strengthened it. I saw the power in duplication.

The next logical step in my education came with duplicators I could work myself, first with the stinky mimeograph machine and then the machine that would change my life – the photocopier. The importance of this machine in the 1980s is hard to emphasise. You placed a document on the glass, pressed a button and a few seconds later an exact-ish copy came out of a slot. If you typed “50″ and pressed the button then fifty copies came out. This was magic.

Proto-anarchists creating their own media on school property.

I played about with the school photocopier whenever possible for a few years until at the age of 14 I was visiting a friend. He was a roleplayer and while I was more a comics nerd the two subcultures were geeky enough to cross over. I was flicking through one of his magazines and found the fanzine reviews section. Despite not really being that interested in the subject matter the idea that there were people producing their own magazines using typewriters and photocopiers lit up in my brain so I sent of for a bunch of them. Seeing how easy it was I decided to do my own zine about comics. It was, of course, awful, but it was mine. I typed everything up, laid it out, stuck in the pictures, worked out the pagination, made multiple double sided photocopies of each page and stapled them together to create booklets which I then tried to sell at the London comic convention. In 1988 I became a publisher at the age of 15.

And I wasn’t alone. There were, I discovered, hundreds of thousands of people like me who were producing their own magazines with print runs ranging from ten to a few thousand, the majority “printed” on FE college copiers or at sympathetic copy shops. And the legacy went back to the 1970s and the punk movement. 1976’s Sniffin’ Glue was the legendary one and I saw a few copies in the 1990s. They were badly-typed single sheets of A4 roughly stapled down the side with the headlines written in marker pen, but they were the lifeblood of the nascent punk scene doing the work that the mainstream music press would not or could not do.

Sniffin’ Glue, setting the bar nice and low.

But more important than the ability to publish was the way these publications enabled communities to form between the readers who were also publishers and the publishers who were also readers. Every zine worth its salt had a reviews section at the back where it listed other zines with their addresses. Sending a bunch of 50p pieces (securely wrapped in cardboard) and SAEs to these addresses would let you into a whole new world, and each of them would lead you to more zines. People would write letters to zines and their addresses would usually be printed too so you could correspond directly with others around the country and the world about that niche subject that in your town only you were interested in. From these networks came exchanges of ideas, collaborations on projects and deep friendships which would not have otherwise happened. (And, of course, personality clashes, legal threats and bitter wars of words.)

The thing is, we all thought we were special. Despite the advocacy of the DIY movement, that anyone could publish a zine, the “movement” was pretty exclusive. Normals were not to be encouraged. There was a definite Them And Us thing going on, regardless of how borderline-mainstream the subject matter was. This was a special thing for the marginals, the dispossessed, the people who television and magazines were not serving and never would. They weren’t giving us the media we wanted so we had to create it ourselves. If your favourite band is Take That then you’ve got Smash Hits serving you there. If it’s the local ska-punk band with a following of a few hundred who distribute their music on cassette then you’re going to have to conduct the interview, type it up, stick it together, slot in the photos (that you took yourself), publish the zine and sell it at their gigs because no-one else is going to.

Blogging, when it started off, was a similar sort of thing. Those who were already immersed what we now call “social media” or “Web 2.0″ saw this blogging thing and latched onto it. Interestingly very few zinesters did as they distrusted this new Internet thing, which is ironic really when you think about it. I wonder if the 60s counter-culture publishers of Oz and IT felt the same about the photocopied zines that followed them? But anyway, it fell to the new digerati to define this new medium, many of whom were quite ignorant of the zine heritage. And yet I could see massive parallels between the zines and the blogs.

Blogger.com in 1999. Readable version.

We’d been told for years that the Internet was going to change the world. Anyone could put their stuff online and reach a potential worldwide audience of millions, but doing so required skills that seemed arcane to most. You had to master the mysterious HTML and FTP and all manner of acronyms. This was not easy. It was a bit like a mimeograph. Tricky, messy and, if you stayed up all night working on it, a bit smelly. When Blogger came along in 1999 (I first saw it in early 2000) it was like the photocopier. Once you’d set it up you could publish with the same ease that you could press the copy button. Write a load of text in the box and hit publish. Suddenly you’re on the same playing field as the online arms of the New York Times or the Guardian or the BBC. You’re a publisher.

But whereas zines tended to stick on the sidelines of society, blogs and their associated platforms of video and photo sharing sites have exploded into the mainstream. And by mainstream I don’t mean the media but the real mainstream of “ordinary” people and their “ordinary” conversations about “ordinary” stuff. Sure, it often looks geeky but let’s be honest, everyone’s a little bit geeky. Everyone has their hobby or niche interest that they can’t talk to anyone else at work about and now everyone can connect though the communities that build around blogs and social networks and forums with others like them from across the country and the world.

Ideas are exchanged, exchanges of ideas, projects collaborated on and deep friendships formed which would not have otherwise happened. (And, of course, personality clashes, legal threats and bitter wars of words. Nothing changes, really!)

Blogger.com in 2008. Readable version.

You can now set up a blog and be publishing to the world on Wordpress.com or Blogger in seconds. Not hours or minutes but seconds. Hell, I bought a domain name, pointed it to a host, installed blogging software and was publishing independently in under 20 minutes the other night. If access to a photocopier was revolutionary in the 1980s access to publishing on the Internet in the 2000s has such a potential to change our society that words like “seismic” don’t quite do it justice. Everyone in the world is potentially a publisher and distributor of media as well as a consumer.

The question is how do we deal with this change? What historical precedent can we refer to in helping us get to grips with what this all means? I think the relatively short history of zines and the empowerment politics of punk can help here. This seems obvious to me having been immersed in both of them throughout my life but the funny thing is I don’t think most of the millions of practitioners of this modern Make Your Own Media culture would recognise themselves as part of a zine tradition. Perhaps they don’t see themselves as publishers or media distributors. Perhaps they just see themselves as talking about stuff, socialising on the internet. That, I think, is even more radical. Are we seeing the end of “media” as a concept now that everyone can do it?

But that can wait for another day.