Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Click is the new Clack

I used to write a zine on a typewrites (clack).  Now I write a blog on a computer (click). 
Obviously there are parallels between the two formats.  
I wrote a zine in high school with a friend and in one year we produced four issues.  Each issue was maybe thirty pages long, and included articles, art, poetry.  It kind of focused on music and teen-angst - those were the themes of most zines we were into.  It was very low tech and labour intensive.  Each issue took tedious hours.  Cutting and pasting the old fashioned way, with glue and scissors.  Doing little drawings, laying it all out on big sheets of paper.  Photocopying, mailing.  Stamps.  Sheesh.  But it was so fun.  I loved doing it.  And I made lots of friends in the process, from all over the world, writing letters back and forth, putting glue over the stamps so they could be re-used.  I look back at those four issues now and of course a lot of it makes me cringe, but some of it's pretty cool, and mostly I'm proud that we did it. 
 
Blogging is so instant, so immediate.  It's nice to see results right away, and you've got the whole world (wide web) at your fingertips to supplement, enhance and support.  And if I'm able to look back at these blogs in ten plus years I'm sure I'll cringe, maybe chuckle, but I don't know if I'll be quite as proud.  It's not really as much of an accomplishment.  Though some people's blogs are works of art, novels - I guess that's a reflection of how much work they put it.  It's not the medium, it's the effort.

No comments:

Post a Comment