Notes From Underground | Notes 3

COMMUNITY

pg. 52 - 'Zines allow writers and readers to select communities of choice rather than those born of circumstance.'

'Pah's Mark Morelli writes, describing how zines opened his eyes to

just how many people - diverse and weird and vulgar and solipsistic and brilliant and funny and indulgent and angry and inventive and so on - are out there still placing their faith in the written word...'

'Communities need institutions. A community is "a collection of people occupying a more or less clearly defined area," according to Robert Park, but, as he elaborates "a community is more than that, it is a collection of institutions." A club needs a clubhouse. And when a community is not define geographically, as the zine community is not, these institutions take on increased importance.'

pg. 54 - 'The new economy  of mass media had expanded the notion of a "literate public," but also displaced many voices to the sidelines'

'In the new mass production world where one product was sold to hundreds and thousands of individuals, the creative powers of most individuals were not needed. Put in a different way, within the Weltanschauung (world outlook) of the new mass culture industry, many people's ideas and creativity were simply unimportant.'

'But these unimportant people still wrote and still created, refusing to be merely a "market" passively consuming the culture prepared for them.'

'Beginning as early as 1812, "amateur papers" (in sharp distinction to the new "professional press") were being printed, in the beginning by children, but, as time went on, more and more by adults.'

'Using both toy presses and printing equipment scavenged from the professional press, amateur journalists grew by leaps and bounds in the post-Civil War period. An 1875 directory listed over 500 writers and editors and almost as many publications.'

'These publications plagiarized popular authors, published corny prose, and reproduced engravings; like zines, they printed pretty much anything their publishers felt like expressing.'

'These amateur publishers didn't just produce papers, they created associations, systems of communication and distribution that are the prototypes of zine communities today.'

pg. 57 - 'If community is traditionally thought of as a homogeneous group of individuals bound together by their commonality, a zine network proposes something different: a community of people linked via bonds of difference, each sharing their originality.'

pg. 58 - 'This model is the very essence of a libertarian community: individuals free to be who they want and to cultivate their own interests, while simultaneously sharing in each other's differences.'