“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.)
Please stop using ‘friend’ as a verb, Pete.
I imagine I speak for a lot of your readers when I say that I find it sickening.
The templatisation of weblogs fulfills a similar function as View Source did for hand-coders, five/ten years back. It means you can get a functional website going very quickly. One of the clever ways that companies are monetising their web applications is by offering greater customisation for a monthly subscription, as Typepad do, but at least what they offer for free can be handsome and functional, and for people first entering the world of websites and blogging, that’s huge. As in all fields, some people want something that’s exactly like the website their friend has while some people want to separate themselves out from the crowd. There are a million options for the latter, it just costs, one way or another. Peopele may visit a site once if it’s particularly good-looking, but they’ll bookmark or RSS a site whose content captures their imagination.
ps Russ L – I read it that Pete used the verb ‘Friend’ with a capital F, which I’d argue isn’t the same as befriending someone, as it implies a relationshop born of an online social network, using the name of the web application to speak generically, in the same way you might use to Googling to describe a particular research methodology. I find it obnoxious, too, but that’s what it’s come to be called, and it’s hard to find another word to sum up that web-based, ostensibly shallow, (though not always), very specific way of teaming up with people you’ve never met.
I realise that, but it’s not like there’s no alternative. I find the (more commonly heard) use of ‘add’ for the same purpose to be significantly less ugly-sounding.
“I intend to add Smithylad.”
“Reader, I added him.”
And so forth.
I’m not sure that WordPress is that difficult actually. I moved my blogger template over to it with the minimum of fuss and hassle. I think it took a couple of nights of effort (mostly learning a new system)
My big problem was getting the RSS XML file to redirect correctly to the new file in WordPress. I think it mostly went well – my intention was to do it without anybody really noticing and I think I managed it! :)
I can’t be arsed because I’m really busy these days. I don’t have a couple days to spend doing nothing but debugging CSS on various browsers. It’s not the death of DIY for me, quite the contrary as I’m running a huge DIY community I built myself at metafilter.com, just that I don’t have time to work on these sorts of details on my personal blog.
Two particular points I picked up in your post:
1. The hey-day of zines was not, for me, about designing your own look – that was something I had to do to make it readable, but I had no great feeling of investment in the look of the thing. If I had been able to use a decent template supplied by someone I would probably have used it. For me, the main thing was the content – Caption-APA was never all that stylised a zine, though towards the end I was quite pleased with some of the design stuff I’d learned.
Same for blogging – I am glad to have a useable, reasonably nice looking template that I don’t have to spend loads of time tweaking and fixing when it breaks. I just want to look after the content.
2. “that lock-in thing again where services like LiveJournal … encourage people to form communities within their walls” and “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?”
This one is a bit harder to answer. Yes, this is a big effect of services like LJ. (In fact the Friending can still happen, but it goes slower – comments on other people’s journals or on communities you belong to makes you visible to people outside your immediate friends list.) The gated community metaphor sounds a little insulting though, especially as it’s a lot more open to joining than that makes it sound. Overall, I’m not really sure that this is any more closed than a personal-zine or an APA is, and actually probably rather more open to people joining. Certainly I wouldn’t have 130 – 140 people reading a zine I put out – not even Caption-APA, and that wasn’t just me anyway.
Pete, WordPress isn’t a scary as a looks. The default template is quite complicated because it allows for lots of stupid configurations, you also don’t need many of the WordPress functions, just mix and match to you needs. If you ever need a hand then just give me a mail.
Perhaps CSS has created similar looking sites, but as this technology is adapted and pushed we’ll really start to see some creativity, these last few years with IE6 have been a sort of transition between the old school /new school.
I’m pretty glad that Flickr has limited style options, as it lets you focus more on the photography rarther than rubbish desgn.
Good post, Pete, as you can tell from the comments.
My two bits: John P’s focus is on the revolutionariness of DIY. More specifically, he’s getting at the qualities of artisanship, where manipulation of the media/medium has multiple rewards. This doesn’t mean we have to reinvent the charcoal stick. Hockney’s Polaroid colllages, David Byrne’s Powerpoint presentation, Andy Warhol’s soup can each use standardised, kit-of-parts media or techniques. But they still produced strikingly original works. The same can happen with Blogger, and maybe even Flickr.
I say maybe because I see Flickr, and various other services, as locking down the options in order to maintain some standard level of performance (which can and does vary at Blogger), of an aesthetic standard (notably missing at myspace), or simply as an expression of control freakery (more evident as time goes by). The constraints challenge people, and these have been some nice attempts to force deviation, but these remain relatively subtle.
At Flickr (among others) the ‘art’ is defined as distinct from the medium. The art happens before you upload. There ain’t much manipulation on site. And, from what I’ve seen, Flickrnauts (tx BB), are largely immune to manipulating each other’s works, which means that they are happy with a dichotomy between content and presentation. Go figure, eh?
To recap: the medium can be manipulated or locked down. People are able to choose, and based on what’s popular, evidently choose to use standard modes of presentation. What does that do for the person who wants both popular interaction and artistic license? Your post provides an answer.
‘The Revolution will not be Youtubed’
I learn something every day. Before the internet we befriended others, now we Friend them.
Interesting piece. It all stems from having only so much time and having to decide how to spend that time. Sometimes it is not so much knowing what to do when on the internet as when to let go of the computer and do something else.
I have to admit that I rather like the satisfaction derived from designing and building my not so good site over the canned options available from third party services. That being said, there is a lot to be said for communities like Flickr that live within rules simply because that’s the only way they can work. The best part for me has been the integration of Flickr into my own site.