the e-zine & blog

I would very much like to revisit the world of the zine and blog. We’ve cornered ourselves into this “comment culture” of social media, where actions and reactions are monitored, triggered, and tracked. It’s fine for what it is. There’s a place for Facebook and other social media platforms, but they don’t encourage the best behavior from us loyal participants.

If social media encourages dislikes and comments, anti-social media encourages a person to engage only through observation. When one reads a magazine, it’s read-only. If you feel strongly in response to what you read, you slam the cover shut or discuss it with a coworker. However, when an X or Facebook post hits a reader in the same way, that person re-shares it with their first visceral emotion, lacking the opportunity to digest their own sentiment before putting it into the world for someone else to be affected by. All of this is logged, aggregated, purchased, and sold so someone can generate profit or refine their service to better facilitate that purpose.

The e-zine was simple. If you didn’t like what you read, you closed it and deleted it. If you hated what you read, you wrote an email, or your own commentary, on a platform of your own. This was a form of discussion that allowed for more than 160 characters. It encouraged the articulation of ideas. You wrote about it in your blog.