Said Michael Jones, chief executive of Science Inc., which makes an app (Wishbone) aimed at teenagers. He's quoted in a NYT article titled "App Makers Reach Out to the Teenager on Mobile." How old is Jones?, you might ask. I did.
Mr. Jones, a 40-year-old Gen Xer, has tracked youth culture since the grunge ’90s, when he started a magazine called Elixir as a University of Oregon sophomore. This was back when teenagers went to bookstores in search of small-circulation “zines.”...Back in his day, they didn't have the internet. They didn't have apps. You couldn't carry your phone around with you, and you couldn't write to anybody on a phone and you couldn't see pictures on a phone, and you couldn't, like, vote on pictures on a phone. We had these things called zines.
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9 comments:
I can't stand the repeated usage of "...(he/she/they would be like...."
It's verbal illiteracy.
OMG! why are we having to hear about this fossil?
It's not OUR fault he was born back in the dark ages!
Zines? They were very niche offerings, but were they around in the 90s? I worked in Walden books in the 80s and I don't recall ever having those. Maybe small urban bookstores carried them, but as far as I was aware zines basically were labors of love run off on mimeograph paper and distributed to friends.
Perhaps my experience is unique?
Heh. "Perhaps."
mimeograph?
I come from the era of mimeograph. Mr. Jones is a generation younger. Zines were xeroxed. Of course, you didn't find them at Walden Books! That's a mall store. You knew when you were in a real bookstore by whether it had zines.
The original zones were made by science fiction fans back as far as the late 1920s.
Zines weren't even really a bookstore thing, although I am sure you might find them at the really cool bookstore that was always holding chats with authors and activists. I always ran into zines for sale at concerts/clubs where bands were playing. It was usually a point of view/theme for the zine such as "revolution" and it had ideas, poetry, artwork, etc. Totally homemade.
I remember the zines in that great place on State Street... what was it? With a long row of magazine racks on the right hand wall, back before The Exclusive, which is gone now too. What was that place?! It was important in the 80s. A landmark.
I graduated high school in 1998 and at my school an underground magazine was published and distributed anonymously. Was called Paradigm Shift and was, yes, photocopied and hand stapled. Pretty cool!
Haha. We did a 'zine in college. We had advertisers and backers...sort of. We put it out for free in stores that sold these things called RECORDS and CDs, not books. Being some of the first reps of Gen X, the established mags got nervous and openly declared that they were out to destroy us w our very first issue. Nice little lesson that there is no such thing as a labor of love w limited advertising dollars.
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