The Zine Scene

When Madonna sang, “We're living in a material world/And I am a material girl” she probably wasn't intending her chorus to become an ironic call-cry for a digitally fatigued generation. But it very well could be. We do indeed live in a material world, one where value is rarely recognised unless it comes in the form of a dollar sign. We're all material girls, consumed with amassing stuff. But we're now also irreversibly enmeshed with an intangible beast – the internet. The world in which material objects reigned supreme is quickly becoming a past viewed in the sepia tones of nostalgia.

It's in this contradictory mess that the humble zine – a material but ephemeral product with little dollar value – finds itself. Some trace the history of zines to the moment Martin Luther staple-gunned his religious manifesto to 16^th century posts, although the proposition that a pissed-off German monk with reformation on the brain was the world's first zinester seems unlikely. More credibly, today's zines are the mutated descendants of science fiction fanzines – the nerd communication networks of yore – but a closer relative of the punk zines in which the alienated youth of the '70s and '80s expressed their otherwise impotent fury. Reductively a zine is something with original content, occasionally appropriated imagery, the making of which involved – and this is important – the use of a photocopier. But that's too dry a description for a creation that's so treasured and lovingly made.

Writer and veteran zine-maker Vanessa Berry has been putting out her own zines since 1996. Those were the days when a Walkman was high technology and the most valuable skill the social misfit could hone was the ability to simultaneously depress the 'play' and 'record' buttons on your tape player with lightning speed. With her 15 years' involvement in the zine scene – not just a witness to the evolution from tape player to iTunes but a participant in the transition from print to ether – Berry is well-placed to comment on the strange longevity of the zine.

At its heart, she explains, a zine is about communication and community. Not the moderated communication cultivated between conventional publisher and purchaser but between readers and between readers and writers; one only has to look back at the sci-fi and punk traditions to see that zines have always been based on building community. As Berry says, she too started in order to find a connection with other people. “Before I made my zine,” she says, “I didn't really feel like I had found my people... Making zines I found that I connected with people who understood me... It was the community that really got me hooked. Today still.”

Importantly, the medium increasingly stands as a loud, albeit small, 'fuck you' to a world built on the instantaneous and on commodification. Zines defy the information age's demand that bigger is better; the capacity to reach absolutely everyone is now so lauded that in self-publication it's practically sacrosanct. Zines are the opposite: “It's like you're sending out a letter to a few people in the world,” says Berry, “[to] people who appreciate not having to reach everybody, people who are happy to keep things small and contained.”

To make a zine you need only an idea and the patience to work through the unavoidable rookie fuck-ups of photocopier operation. But it also takes time; in the information age time has been so sped up that we lose our minds if a Vimeo video takes more than four seconds to buffer. The idea that someone would bother spending a night standing by an Officeworks photocopier only to reach a limited audience and make no money is anathema to modern idea of self-publishing. So much so that the question arises: will the blog kill the zine just as video killed the radio star?

“When blogs started appearing there was a dip in zine-making,” concedes Berry. “It didn't die out, but there was a time when people questioned why you would make a zine. It picked up again and I think it was response to so much being digital… It's nice to either make things by hand or even hold something that's been made by hand. The internet has failed to kill them so far,” she continues. They're a small thing, Berry says, but perhaps these days we need small, good things to rip us from the ether.