Last weekend, Feorag NicBhride live-blogged Novacon 38’s panel about “whether LiveJournal has eaten fanzine fandom.”
I have resisted the temptation to think of this as another in the perpetual series of will-electronic-communication-kill-paperzines panels we’ve been having at conventions since the days when unknown fans showed up in the audiences claiming they were publishing fanzines on five-inch floppies.
It’s obviously not the same, for at least two reasons. First, the panel was full of interesting speakers, including
Paperzines do seem destined to die, yet they have enjoyed an even more lingering death than Little Nell. I suppose the fact that I am still publishing one isn’t exactly speeding up the ending.
Credit to Cheryl Morgan who’s already posted these links, as well as the news that Novacon 38 was also where Steve Green and Martin Tudor chose to re-launch Critical Wave, which is available online at efanzines.com.
[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]
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Eight-inch floppies actually, Mike. Martin Hoare and I worked on microcomputers back in the very early (pre Apple II) days. Langford would have had access to the machines as well.
There will always be a space for tangible, concert, media. Now the argument can be made that the demand my decline, but there will always be the need to have books, news papers, and other forms of published materials, to be something I can touch. Maybe I’m one of the only people who feel this way, but I would rather curl up on my sofa with a book, then with my laptop so I can read a story. To quote a character from one of my favorite TV shows, “I like books because I can smell them, feel them, get to know them. Old books have a history behind them, and have stayed around for a reason.”
I personally feel that there is a generation out there that is looking to find things that are REAL, because they are so used to the etherial world of the internet where things exist as abstract constructs like binary code. Sure, blog are important. FaceBook, Live Journal, WordPress, all these great technologies make it “Easier” to reach more people. But there comes a point where you realize that it all exists in the form of eletro-magnetic particles/charges that are stored in some box somewhere. If its something worth preserving, it has to be tangible to preserve it.