Zines

Posted on July 16, 2010 by infophibian

I’m pretty new to the zine world, but I feel right at home there. It turns out people make zines for a lot of the same reasons that people blog or use social media. If you’re passionate about something, or have a story to share, the zine community is a place where you can find like-minded folk to share it with.

I came to the zine world in a kind of roundabout way. I’ve been seeking online community since my family got a computer when I was 13 and I made some email penpals that petered out after a few exchanges. Since then I’ve made lasting friendships on bulletin board communities, and I used to have an online diary back in the day (you know, the early 2000s). Now I have two blogs and I tweet, and I find people with similar interests that way. I knew about zines from my days in an undergraduate Women’s Studies program, but I didn’t find zine-making until I met some zine librarians while I was in library school.

I <3 the Anchor Archive Zine Library in Halifax. I’m a regular volunteer there: it’s where I go to get my geek on and do some cataloguing when I’m in the mood. We had our annual 24-Hour Zine Challenge this past weekend, and it was the first time I was able to participate. There was cake and midnight nachos. There was dancing in the backyard under a leaky yet respectable tarp. And there was lots of people buzzing around working on their zines. I made one about my love for snail mail:

The cover of my zine,

At one point, someone who dropped in to see what was going on asked me “wouldn’t it be better to just have a blog? That way you wouldn’t waste paper.”

I suppose you could look at that way, but I don’t. Blogs might not use up paper (you’re not printing out my blog, are you? That is called Doing It Wrong), but creating, hosting, and accessing a blog uses electricity, and computer hardware is not exactly environmentally friendly. (Sidenote: My site is hosted by Taproot Hosting: they use wind-powered electricity and they plant a tree for every new client who signs up. They’re also super quick at replying to customer service emails.) But that’s not my only justification for zine-making. There’s something really satisfying about making something with your hands, about considering the layout of your pages before you photocopy, cutting and pasting in a non-metaphorical way.

One of my guidelines that helps me survive in an information overloaded world is to make my own communications that I put out into the world as meaningful as possible. The comparatively laborious process of zinemaking is a perfect medium for this, because so much effort goes into what I’m working on that I take special care with what I produce.

The atmosophere during the challenge reminded me of what I like about online commnities. People read each other’s works in progress, offered feedback and encouragement, learned new things and connected with people who had similar interests. I met another mail geek and we traded zines. I felt a similar sense of connectedness and pride when I noticed people taking my zine from the swap box as I do when I’m looking at blog traffic or comments. I rarely experience places like that offline, where the accidents of geography and temporality make it harder to meet up with people interested in your niche. The folks at Anchor Archive put a lot of work into creating and maintaining that unique community space. The zine I made was meaningful because of the people I could share it with, both during the event and afterwards through the mail. That’s ultimately what I want out of bloging and tweeting: meaningful connections with like-minded folk.

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In which Jane Rule helps me downsize my book collection

Posted on July 5, 2010 by infophibian

“It’s not that I’m possessive of much that I own, more that I felt required to give them a home or find another for them where the stories that surround them can be told again, where new stories might be attracted to or by them.” –Jane Rule, from her essay “Things” in the 2008 collection Loving the Difficult published by Hedgerow Press.

I am a book hoarder: I keep books even if I know I will never read them again. Despite many recent efforts to curtail this habit, I’m fearful that my entire life is going to look like this one day:

A used bookstore with crwoded shelves and several stacks of books on the floor.And while an overflowing used bookstore is a lovely place to spend a few hours getting lost in if you have the time, it is really inconvenient if you have to find anything specific in it, or if it becomes your entire life.

I am trying to learn to give my books away. Like Rule, I want them to go “where the stories that surround them can be told again, where new stories might be attracted to or by them.” Rule gave her books to family members and friends who visited her. I do this when I have a book I know someone else will enjoy. But most people I know are in the same boat: they live in apartments and move often, and they take pains to ensure an uncluttered life.

Enter Bookcrossing, a social site that “makes the world a library, and lets you follow the progress of the books you give away. When you register a copy of a book on the site, you have a chance to write a journal entry recording whatever you think is significant about a book before “releasing” it to either a friend or a total stranger. If you’re lucky, other people will also go to the site and and use the ID number you inscribe inside the front cover to record how the book came to them and what they thought of it.

Unless they’re a fellow Bookcrosser, there’s a good chance they won’t: I’ve only had a few books with more than one entry. One was called Missing Sarah, about one of the women who went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It was found by a homeless person who collects books, and a friend of his logged into the site to write about it. The book was passed around to several different people: much better than sitting on my shelf unread.

There’s a site I tried recently called Bookmooch, where members can list books for trade. It was satisfying to clear out a bunch of books I wasn’t going to read, but even though each book was going to someone who really wanted it, it was harder for me to send them off. I think that if I listed each book on Bookcrossing, recording how it came to me and where I was when I read it, and gave other people the chance to do the same, it would be easier to send it off to a Bookmoocher. I would feel like I still had something to show for what I’d read, which is my main motivation for hoarding.

I haven’t been active on Bookcrossing in a few years, so going back and seeing the books I released brought back some memories. I don’t actually feel the need to reread any of those books, but I liked looking back and remembering where I was when I read them, what was going on in my life that led me to them. It’s just like browsing my bookshelf, except my Bookcrossing profile page doesn’t take up several square feet of precious floor space or cost several hundred dollars to ship across the country.

I don’t have the books anymore, but I still have the stories.

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My guidelines for living in an information overloaded world

Posted on June 28, 2010 by infophibian

I hear a lot of negative things about what living in an information overloaded world is doing to us. The amount of digitized data available freely on the web, microblogging sites like twitter and tumblr, text messaging, smartphones and location-based social networking are contributing to decreased attention spans, increased expectations of keeping up-to-date, and the expectation of constant availability. It’s a scary and exciting time.

Can it be overwhelming? Absolutely. I started a new job three months ago which requires current knowledge about a lot diverse subjects, and I’m still climbing up that learning curve: reading new blogs and books, trying to ask the right questions, attending conferences, finding new twitter friends. Some days it feels unmanageable. Sometimes I need a break from the Internet, from taking in anything new, and that’s why I knit and sew and enjoy playing with my cat and swimming and dancing.

But I love it. I love waking up each morning and opening facebook, email, twitter, google reader, and anything else I might be trying out that day, to get flooded by information. And I’ve decided that makes me an infophibian: someone who’s happily adapting to information overload. Thriving in it, even.

I’m a librarian and archivist by training, and I currently work as a web strategist at a Canadian university. I spend most of my day online, organizing information. I have a lot to say about decreased attention spans, multi-tasking, the semantic web, social networking, book hoarding, usability, and information architecture, which is why I started this blog to write about them.

For now I’ll leave you with my guidelines for living in an information overloaded world. They’re informed by my both my professional training and my personal philosophy. A little bit about that: even though it’s my job to be, in the rest of my life I’m not very anal about being perfectly organized. I can be downright sloppy, in fact. I don’t make packing spreadsheets. I don’t have a carefully thought-out filing system for my tax documents and credit card bills. I don’t organize my gmail inbox using tags. And I get by just fine.

My guidelines for living in an information overloaded world:

1. Learn to let go. Don’t feel guilty if you can’t absorb everything. It’s easy to get FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and feel like you have to read ALL OF THE BLOGS and ALL OF THE TWITTER. But it’s okay to mark everything in your blog reader as read. Really. If you have unread emails in your inbox from last year, go ahead and mark them unread as well. If something is important enough, and you don’t catch it the first time, it will come back to you. The universe is funny like that.

2. Make your own communications count. Make them meaningful. This is not where I tell you not to post what you had for lunch. Some people will love reading what you had for lunch (me included, unless you had seafood). There’s a reason people engage in small talk and its online equivalent. But do consider what you’re putting out into the world, and why you’re doing it.

3. A little bit of management goes a long way. You have to be a bit proactive. Pay attention to how you read and scan. If you find yourself automatically glazing over a certain person’s post every time you see their avatar, it’s time to stop following them and save the mental energy. If you don’t benefit from the flyers that get delivered to your house, post a sign on your mailbox asking not to receive junkmail (people listen to those, right?).

How do you survive, or thrive, in an information overloaded world?

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