ZinePete

In his giant reminiscence of the Brighton gig-going culture he partook in as a youth, Gavin “Gav” Burrows articulates a ponder I have regarding the zine revival of late.

Isn’t all this squat-like something of a simulation? ‘Squat’ has become a ‘look’ not an activity, like the look of cassette tapes becoming a style icon once we stopped using them for listening to.

Hmm…

A couple of articles in the Guardian caught my eye this last week as part of my job of knowing about the Internet and stuff.

Found on Twitter

Everyone’s a critic now by Neal Gabler.

The point isn’t that the traditional critics are always wrong and these populists are right, or even that these comments are overwhelmingly negative or invariably take on the critical consensus. More often than not, they aren’t and they don’t. The point is that authority has migrated from critics to ordinary folks, and there is nothing – not collusion or singleness of purpose or torrents of publicity – that the traditional critics can do about it. They have seen their monopoly usurped by what amounts to a vast technological word-of-mouth of hundreds of millions of people.

Why the BBC’s old guard called time on the Wibbly Wobbly Web by John Naughton.

What always struck me about its senior executives – in both the commercial and public sector – was how smug and self-satisfied they seemed. In a way, this was understandable: they were masters of a particular universe, rulers of a medium that dominated the information ecosystem, dictated the political agenda, and determined the daily habits of a large chunk of the population. At that time, the most powerful apparatchiks in the BBC and ITV were the schedulers – the planners who designed ways of holding the attention of a mass audience. Their craft included tricks like not scheduling some things against stronger competitors; making sure that one had a follow-on that would keep audiences from switching channels over the 9pm watershed; winning the ratings war over the Christmas period and so on. Watching them at work, one realised that effectively they were playing chess – and that the pawns in their arcane games were the viewers.

Embedded in the corporate DNA of push media like broadcast television is the assumption that viewers are, if not exactly idiots, then passive consumers. The deal is that they receive gratefully what we, the broadcasters, decide to create. The couch potato is thus the paradigmatic product of broadcast television. So you can see why television executives were so puzzled by the web, and particularly by the rise in user-generated content like blogs or YouTube videos: to them, the idea of such content is an oxymoron, like “military intelligence”. Viewers aren’t creative, and even if they were, there’s no way anyone would let them publish their crap.

It doesn’t take much to see this as all about power. They had it, it’s moving away from them so they’re trying to roll things back, either by denigrating and dismissing the new holders of the power or actually rolling things back. You see it happening in all industries affected by the Internet, which is most of them. It’s sad but inevitable. We can only hope not too much damage is done to the important things during the transition.

Made up by me just now. Bathe in my cleverness.

But it’s too easy to just see this in terms of monolithic organisations like the BBC or the monolithic egos of professional critics. I think it’s a thing that applies to anyone who sets themselves up as a gatekeeper or expert in a field, and that means anyone who’s produced a media space or object, be it a television channel, a newspaper, gallery show, a music zine, a club night or, yes, a blog.

I was thinking about this when in the Ikon Gallery bookshop looking at all the Art magazines on sale. Not the ones that were Art – the ones about Art. In the age of the Internet, what is the point of a small-circulation publication that inevitably won’t make any money? If these contents are important why wouldn’t you want them to be seen by as many people as possible? Why lock them away?

My boisterous Internet side says this is because the contents can’t stand up on their own. Strip away the artificial scarcity of a magazine, the walls separating it from the ETEWAF of the Internet and the emperor is shown to be nekkid.

But my realist side knows this happens online too. There isn’t a “big soup” into which people stick spoons in and randomly get stuff. The ‘net is sorted into manageable lumps and those methods of sorting create barriers just as impenetrable as an old-media object.

It’s amusing how humans can take a radically open environment and clog it up with barriers. Language seems to be the big one. Countless geeks who promote the openness and freedom of the ‘net and shout about transparency and information wanting to be free will happily retreat into cliquish speakeasies where newcomers are instructed to keep quiet and learn the lingo else feel the wrath of the old timers.

Similarly zine culture has a tendency towards creating as many rules as it purports to break down. Don’t use DTP, be left-wing, write headings by hand, send an SAE with your order, all manner of rules and regulations that, while often well intentioned and positive, do create barriers to creation and consumption.

There’s probably a quote somewhere along the lines of “be careful who you criticize lest you become them yourself” and it strikes me as something that can be applied to all human activities. The student activist becomes the authoritarian home secretary, the cultural warrior becomes the cultural gatekeeper, the child becomes the parent.

And it’s not necessarily a problem. It’s just worth reminding ourselves when we talk about creating an “alternative” to the mainstream that the alternative we’re building is only different in scale. Its fundamental effects will still be to create a monument to elitism.

I very much welcome your comments on this.