Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Web 2.0 adopted DIY individualism while abandoning zine culture's anti-capitalist and feminist critique

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tagsja-picks, question, xref, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, singleton, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@marwick_status_2013, loc. 98

2 min read

Web 2.0 adopted DIY individualism while abandoning zine culture’s anti-capitalist and feminist critique

Evidence

Blogs and e-zines lacked the anti-capitalist ethos and rhetoric around “selling out” that characterized punk and zine culture. As Freeman points out, hosting a blog on a commercial server makes one vulnerable to the whims of a ser vice provider. Moreover, the explicit feminist ethos found in abundance in paper and webzine culture is a marginal part of blog culture, and almost entirely absent from Web 2.0. (The most popular women’s blogs are about food, fashion, or parenting, while the “feminist blogosphere” focuses almost entirely on traditional politics and feminist theory.) Although zines and DIY culture celebrated the individual and rejected Big Media, they did so within a critique of labor and the ser vice industry. Not so with Web 2.0. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 98

Categorization

  • QUESTION: Why did the openly feminist ethos of zine culture get so thoroughly displaced in Web 2.0 self-branding spaces? Worth probing further.
  • XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior knowledge of media history and feminized labor; echoes tensions between individualist and structural critique. — connects to: Web 2.0 ideology fuses 1960s counterculture with pro-capitalist techno-determinism — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 41; Web 2.0’s anti-establishment rhetoric coexisted with celebration of tech founders as celebrities — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 53; Self-published zine culture explicitly rejected corporate capitalism and consumerism — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 82 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

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