The History and
Characteristics of Zines
by Fred Wright
Reading this article I couldn’t help but notice the similarities of fanzines and zines to today’s forums and blogs. It seems that fanzines are in the late 1920s-30s what today is a forum or blog. Yes the initial interest revolved around science fiction subject matter but when fanzines made the transition to zines it was because people evolved to other interests and wanted to communicate with each other. The example they used was a fan base to “Murder Can Be Fun” or some random subject that would be otherwise hard to justify as being a fan of. With the zines, it started out with irregularly published low budget pieces of writing which utilized cheapest of technologies at the time. In my opinion that’s the case with blogging, all you need is internet access and keyboard which even if you don’t own, you can readily access in school or cyber-pubs for practically loose change. And when in the 1920s 30s people posted addresses and started communicating with each other they formed a network, which to me seems we do with forums. Its interesting to see that after fanzines evolved, they had to be broadened in meaning and renamed to zines because of how different yet similar they were to their original predecessors. And like than, the zines and fanzines are evolving as well, is tweeting the new evolution? People with similar interests update and communicate practically “real time” on subjects that interest them? Is this a foreshadow of the direction in which we are evolving our zines to?
Fanzines and Zines may be the retro version of “Blogs & Forums”, but that means that “Facebook & Twitter” are the evolved form, combining both Blogs & Forums in our generation. If you think about how we used to communicate in the old days (according to studies and archival proof), we used to have birds fly around and send paper messages to one another, then the mailman brought the letters to people, and now through email we send messages to each other. Stating an opinion, like we do in forums, is the same as Twitter, as you mentioned, but an evolved form can be video conferences like we have oovoo and skypeg. Technology is taking over the “Print” world and everything we used to do by hand and paper will now be done by air and eyes. At least that’s my opinion. Also when you least expect it, reading will be the least priority needed anywhere. Speech will be a higher requirement only because I believe that reading will be no longer in use as apposed to reciting every idea one has.