"Being in your own band and making your own music, or making your own zine or drawing your own comic and putting it together yourself in this day and age really is a revolutionary act. I truly believe that. The way things are designed now, you are supposed to give up your self power, to give up your choices, your freedom to act, to make your own decisions or to do things for yourself in the way that you want to do them. And it's because - "Look! There's all these options here for you that are already prepackaged, and they're very convenient. I'm sure you can find one that will fit you just fine." Well, no. I really believe that just the act of saying "I'm going to do something myself" is revolutionary. It goes against the grain, in a very real way. That continues to be where the excitement is, for me. It always has been and a lot of people don't understand that." John Porcellino, interviewed by Zak Sally in The Comics Journal #241, Feb 2002 That paragraph struck me as god's own truth four years ago and re-reading it this weekend it again jumped out and grabbed me by the throat. John P's coming from an earlier, pre-internet perspective and I've always thought the pioneering work and ideas that came out of the punk / DIY / zine scenes has a huge relevance to the brave new world of internetworking, or whatever you want to call it. And yet no-one really seems to be making that connection. Maybe the pioneers of the social internet are too young to have experienced the relative power of zines for themselves, maybe they just never came across them (zines were by their nature a small-scale phenomena so it's not too surprising they weren't on the radar of code monkeys) and it's not inconceivable that many of the major players in the zine world rejected the early web. Whatever the reasons for the disconnect in continuity I believe you can draw a very distinct line from someone in the early 90s putting out a zine to someone in the early 2000s writing a blog, not just through similarities in content and expression but in the way no zine was an island. They were part of complex ecosystems supported by the mail service that were incredibly vibrant and impossible to map, just as out unfortunately named blogosphere is today. I think we're at an interesting point in the development of the DIY internet. On the one hand more people that ever before are publishing their work, be it a text diary, ramblings like these, photos, movies, artwork, whatever form of self expression takes their fancy. This is truly revolutionary, vitally important and something to be celebrated. On the other hand the tools that we use to do this are owned by a small number of businesses who dictate how this expression shall be packaged and distributed. I use Flickr a lot these days. It's where I spend most of my time when online and it's been very good to me over the two years I've been a member. My photography has significantly improved, I've made new friends, learned lots about the art and craft of taking photos and so on. If I'd set up a photo gallery on peteashton.com and posted my photos on there I would never have gotten to the stage I'm at now. I needed the networking environment Flickr provides to do that. On the other hand, my Flickr page looks like everybody else's, I can't organise my sets as neatly as I'd like, I can't manipulate the photos in the groups I manage in interesting ways, I can only export my photos in a specific number of sizes with sightly crufty HTML I have to edit... In short, I can only do what Flickr allows me to do. This is not necessarily a problem (and the Flickr API does allow me to take the information and write my own programs to manipulate it however I'd like, except I'm not a programmer), but it is a trade off. By accepting Flickr's limitations I benefit from their community and their tools give me more time to actually look at other people's photos and take my own. Another interesting side effect is that photographers outside of Flickr don't really exist for me. I'm locked in, not by force but psychologically. This only recently occurred to me and I'm not sure I like it. MySpace is another interesting example. The success of MySpace was, in part, explained by their letting users do whatever the hell they wanted with their profile pages making it, in my mind, the closest a modern social networking site has gotten to the zine aesthetic. Most of them are utterly illegible and look atrocious, but they're done by people who are expressing themselves. But even so, there are limitations on how you use MySpace and again you've got the lock-in thing. Either you're in MySpace all the time or your not. I haven't been in for ages now, partly because I can't be arsed with the retarded user interface but mainly because I've been in Flickr, and now I dread logging in and check my messages because there'll be a hell of a catch up to do. As such I'm sure I'm missing out on things within the Birmingham music scene, which was my main motivation for getting involved with MySpace in the first place. On top of shutting out the rest of the internet the two services, while sharing the same origins, are mutually incompatible. It's all or nothing. Blogging, in it's purest sense, should be the natural heir to the zine ethos. There's a low barrier to entry, no preconceptions about content and anyone who can write can do one. However, recent developments have me worried about how this is going to mature over the next decade. Firstly there's that lock-in thing again where services like LiveJournal and Vox (both, as it happens, from Six Apart) encourage people to form communities within their walls. The motivation for this is pretty benign and useful if you want to restrict your readership to those you know and trust but I think parallels with real world gated communities need to understood. Putting it bluntly, when you're in your safe little community you're oblivious to the outside world. This, of course, is often the whole point because the outside world is full of twats, but it does mean you're invisible to anyone out there who might be interesting, who you might learn from. Why would anyone go to the trouble of Friending you when all the stuff that shows you to be an interesting person worth Friending is hidden behind a friends-only wall? As the blogging services try to emulate the success of Flickr and MySpace and YouTube and the rest, again with benign intentions, this is going to become the norm. My other worry is more personal and I'm not sure how important it is in the wide scheme of things, but it comes down to presentation. WordPress, which has one of the most daunting templating systems I've ever cast my eyes over, is currently gaining ground as the recommended DIY blogging platform based, it seems, on plugins and what they call Themes. The idea, as I understand it, is you never get your hands dirty with the actual code. You simply select one of a few thousand themes (essentially a CSS file), add a few plugins for your sidebar and whathaveyou, and that's it. Movable Type, previously the platform on choice, is loosing ground because it doesn't have such a seamless Themes system and in trying to move towards it have made their templates more and more complex so hacking them by hand is a chore I personally don't have time for. I know I'm an old hack but when I started blogging part of the point of doing it, apart from the major factor of publishing my own work online, was designing my own site from scratch. It wasn't enough just to have my words out there - the whole package had to come from me. That's what DIY means. Getting someone else to do it, whether your paying them or not, really isn't the same as doing it yourself, and I think this is quite important. Of course, back in the old days learning basic HTML wasn't that hard and you could get by with some pretty shoddy coding. Nowadays we're using CSS for the styling and, thanks to a myriad of factors, coding CSS from scratch to create anything that doesn't look boring is an absolute bitch. Web design, which had its roots in DIY, has become a profession only to be attempted by experts, and even some of those experts can't be arsed. I'd even go so far as to say the evolution of CSS over the last few years has all but killed grass roots DIY website design. I should conclude (and yes, I really should conclude - I was only meaning to post the John P quote and leave it at that. Insomnia is a cruel mistress...) by reiterating that whatever concerns I've badly articulated in this post the fact that millions of people are able to publish their work and find a receptive audience for it, even if that audience is just one other person, is a fantastic thing that should be celebrated. But I worry that in rush to make things easier and safer we're in danger of losing the very thing that made it important, the thing that made it revolutionary. Here's hoping I'm wrong. (You'll no doubt have noticed that having urged people to appreciate the rich history of zines I've neglected to outline any of it. There's a reason for that. It's a dauntingly huge task and quite hard to articulate. Maybe later.)