intro: there was a wicked messenger...

Well kids, it’s time for us to face up to a cold ugly fact: The Internet sucks. The world is at our fingertips, yet all we do is look for free porn sites. Friends and family can be sent messages instantaneously, and all we do is forward lame lists of jokes that we get from others. Never have so many done so little with so much technology.

"email" spelled backwards almost says "lame"

It bites to come home from work, check your email, and you’ve got six new messages -

· Two are weak jokes. "This one’s funny!!" the sender usually notes, the relationship between number of exclamation marks and the amount of humor in the joke is always inverse.
· One is a warning of a virus hoax passed on from some paranoid who insists IT’S NOT A HOAX because he got the email from a secretary in his company’s IS department, and she would know a real virus when she sees one.
· One is some cute (i.e. nauseating) picture or animation that your 14.4K modem takes twenty minutes to download. (Though on a positive note - if it’s a picture of somebody’s baby, you don’t have to use that fake wow-I-sure-am-fascinated-with-children face that you use when you encounter babies or baby photos out in the real world.)
· One is an urban legend passed on by some dolt who thinks that flashing your headlights will get you killed by a gang, or that Microsoft will send you to Disney World if you pass the message on, or that NASA has discovered the missing day mentioned in the Book of Joshua etc. etc.
· One is a message from a friend that contains his/her actual thoughts, feelings, and concerns. Your friend’s humor is truly funny, and you make a note to fire back a reply before you hit the hay that evening.

And by now, after being online for a few years, you’re at the point the last message is the only email you bother to read anymore. The "delete" button gets used for all the others before you even read them. You politely hint to people that you don’t read their jokes and lame-ass forwarded junk mail, but they don’t care. They continue to pass on unimportant things, because by somewhat controlling the flow of useless information, they feel important. And you come off as a crank for not appreciating the so-called humor, and for seeing bullshit as bullshit.

You see, the new rule is that If It’s On The Internet or In An Email, Then It Must Be True. Here’s a test: the next time someone forwards you political propaganda or an urban legend or a hoax, fire back a response saying that you disagree or that you think it’s a crock. I godguarandamntee it you will be scolded by the sender. Why? You’re not credible, you don’t have the right to question something that is ON THE INTERNET. For all the talk of the Internet leveling the playing field, that it gives everyone a voice and allows us to be more of a true democracy, you still can’t shoot your mouth off and get away with it. You simply don’t have permission to voice an original thought or opinion ... unless you create your own website, right? Well, maybe - but that means you have to go through the bother of expressing yourself. Most web-creating folks can’t handle that sort of pressure. They substitute technological know-how for passion and imagination. Which leads us to...

brief tangent: zines rule

The beauty of the zine is that anyone can be a star. You do your first issue - you write some stuff, format it, photocopy it, staple it, and mail it out to your friends and family; then word-of-mouth kicks in and slowly but surely you get dozens of readers who admire your rantings and ravings. Now you’ve got your very own following - you’ve bypassed the publishing industry and your voice is being heard. You’re as broke as you’d be if you were a Real Writer and you’re getting twice the writing done, because you’re always sweating it out over the next issue.

Zines are fun and I can safely say that my life is more enjoyable - yes, and I would even go as far to say I have a better life - because I am a zinester. So it’s been with some consternation that I’ve been hearing some of the same great things said about websites - that anyone can make one, that anyone can be a star, that it’s a way to ignore The Rules (whatever they may be) and get your voice heard. All of this may be true, but most of the personal websites I’ve seen in my hours of surfing do not hold a candle to zines.

nerd bottleneck on the information superhighway

As you may have heard, I completed my own website to showcase my zine and other writings. Some of you may remember me in the past saying that I didn’t want to hassle with creating a website. My instincts were dead-on: it wasn’t that much fun. Not as much fun as sitting in the Urban Bean or the CC Club with a notebook and a pen (two of my South Minneapolis writing rituals), that’s for damn sure. But it was, I guess, educational. After researching and reading up on personal websites (I define a personal website as one that is created by one or two persons, and is meant to tell us more about the individual(s), as opposed to being a fanpage or promoting a product or such) as part of my website-creating mission, I’ve come to the conclusion that the typical Dick and Jane personal website is a joke. No, I take that back - it’s not even a joke, it’s simply a bore.

Although I owe a good portion of my zine readership to the fact that readers found my writing through the Web or via email, I don’t write with the Web in mind. Although it’s mind-blowing to consider that anyone on the globe with Internet access can read my stuff, it simply becomes one more reason to be entertaining and informing about the mundane details of my so-called life. When I do my zine, I slap it into its twelve (sometimes sixteen) page format, mail it out; then get around to emailing it and getting it to its website. So yeah, I may be biting the hand that feeds (not literally) me, but I can’t help pointing out that personal websites have a long way to go before they can ever be compared to zines.

Maybe part of my beef between the two formats is my personal preferences in how the creative process unfolds. When I do an issue of my zine, there are certain rituals that I can’t imagine web geeks (I’ll be using the kinder term "webster" from now on) having. Like when I’m photocopying my zine; I grab a copier at the Uptown copy shop that faces Hennepin Avenue. Then on spring and summer days, while the copier is grinding away, I’m standing there scoping out the lovelies in miniskirts and halter tops walking by. When typing HTML for my website, all I can do is break and surf over to look at Ana Voog or August Live. I’ll take the live image with instantaneous replay every time.

After photocopying, a stroll to the Uptown Bar for victory beers may be in order. A webster undoubtedly celebrates updates to his site by updating the web page that lists the updates to his site. (More on that later.) And making an issue maildrop by walking to the mailbox late at night after stapling and addressing all those zines is always fun. I either light up a Philly Blunt or pack a Grain Belt longneck tucked inside a brown paper bag. I can’t imagine uploading something via FTP having any kind of mildly decadent ritual associated with it.

The reason I imagine the websters have no great rituals in their creative process is due to the lack of imagination in their websites. Here’s what you get from your typical personal website: pictures of dogs, pictures of children, what kind of employment the webster has, links to other lame personal pages, lists of what the webster likes (not thoughts or opinions, just lists), pictures of cats, pictures of friends, lists of every change they’ve ever made to their site (for Internet historians’ use, no doubt) ... and of course the dreaded computer lingo. Websters always have to mention what kind of computer they have, what kind of modem they use, what programming languages they know, and what kind of scanner they own. Which begs the question: WHO THE HELL CARES???

Conversely, I guarantee you that every zinester has: gluesticks, a saddle-style stapler (which I guarantee you they don’t bother detailing in their zine), and a healthy dose of attitude (which they’ll gladly share with you.) Zinesters have opinions, feelings to share. When you read a good piece in a zine, it may change the way you think about things. Specifically, I’m thinking of an essay on capitalism written by Elissa Nelson in her hope zine. I thought about that essay for days, and finally ended up writing her a big long letter about it. Or there’s stuff like the Cometbus zine - a pal of mine described the Double Deuce (Cometbus #42) issue as being "up there with The Catcher in the Rye." Personal websites have yet to generate this sort of discourse.

Sure - personal websites generally look cool, some of them have graphics that are astounding. But you can’t take them with you on the bus, or to the bar, or leave ‘em in your bathroom for handy reading material. Not to mention that everybody can afford to buy a zine, but not everyone owns a PC or can afford Internet access. So much for the grassroots aspect of personal websites. Zines, even when they’re stuck in a look-at-me-I’m-angry mode, have personal websites beat in the areas of content and passion -hands-down, no question.

Okay, so nobody is making me view these websites (just like I hope no one is making you read this either), but any attempts to say that personal websites are revolutionary must stay on hold until most of ‘em stop looking like the twenty-first century equivalent of your next-door neighbor’s boring slide show. Because ultimately, there is no comparison between the two formats. Zines are mostly about words, thoughts, and having something interesting to say. When I read a zine, I can imagine myself having a conversation with the writer. Can’t say as I feel the same way about personal websites, which for now are mostly about what somebody can do when they have a scanner, a bunch of software, and too much time on their hands. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe most zinesters probably jump into the biz with self-absorbed delusions of grandeur and a headstrong take-on-the-world outlook, while most websters are content with just being friendly-yet-dull information booths.

So a tip for websters everywhere: forget your lists-of-likes, your garden photos, and your hardware specifications. Instead, take a lesson from zinesters everywhere: be entertaining, make stuff up, goof, purge, construct diatribes, be interesting dammit! Your technology bores us, use your mind. The world is watching you, remember?

- written in 1999

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