Millenium Artist William C. "Bill" Burns, Jr., offers the following
perspective on our FUTURE OF ZINES  RINGSIDE topic:

"By the way this is not a scientific article, but rather an anecdotal reflection, so don't look for data tables and statistical breakdowns.  There are none.  This is science fiction and as such demands some willing suspension of disbelief."

Let's assume a speculative perspective and consider the future of publishing, science fiction and otherwise.  In our speculation, let's start with the present (or our erception thereof) and extrapolate from there.

Currently there are two principal ways that zines are conceived.  Either an artist simply wants to share their work with others, and overcomes their intrinsic fear of organizing and presenting their work, or an editor is struck with a thematic idea for a publication.

The Editor

Picture a zine editor, maybe a graduate literature major who never entirely recovered from reading Tolkien's Silmarillion.  Our editor starts out with wild ideas of what art (I use art generically here, to mean poetry and prose as well as graphic art) should appear in the publication.  Really, it's always been this way, and who can see this changing for several millennia?  The thing that is different is that our new-sprung editor has Internet access, either through their school, or their father's or  other's computer.  Hence there is very little printing cost.  Notably missing are the production people--the people who used to take the art of the artist, edited by the ditors, and put it in books and on paper.  There's always been a niche market for these services, but their heyday is almost over.  Perhaps there is an arc to the life of our editor--a path of ascension, plateau and decline.  He/she starts with a publication that is art for the art's sake, which eventually degenerates into taking what artists do and welding it into a viable product that can be marketed.

Let's roll the clock forward.  Our editor has had a web page for five years without much of a readership.  Said editor is suffering conflicting objectives, always caught in cross currents of gathering funding while still managing to put together something that speaks to the human spirit.  Be nice to editors, they have tough lives.

The Artist

Now let's leave our poor editor in suspended animation for a moment and consider the artists/creators.  Who knows what it is that calls some people to produce art?  But some are "called" while others have simpler lives.  (Let me just interject, I never trust anyone who says they enjoy writing.  It just seems somehow  perverse!)  Our writers' careers also describe an arc of sorts. They start out giving everything away, but as they grow a little older they must face a most terrible decision:  They can try to make a living creating their art, or they try to get a daytime job and do the art on the side. Either way, they have to find some way to secure funding.  Perhaps this brings us to the biggest question of all.  Should an artist create simply for the joy of creation, or should an artist require compensation?

My take on this is, the only thing of value in this or any society is time. You can always get more money, more food, more property, but you can never get more time.  Still, our society is geared toward the acquisition of product, not compensation for time, I don't care what Nesbit said.

These ideas bring us back to our poor tortured editor.  Very few of the current Internet zines are actually turning a profit.  [Editor's note:  Bill is a master of understatement.   Very few are even recovering costs!]  Most of the material available on the Internet is placed in there as a gift to the world, or charity.  Creativity is typically undervalued in western society.

The players--the creators and their technical supporters--have been mainly concerned with the acquisition of equipment and not with arranging compensation for creativity.  It  is assumed that you will be creative on your own if you have the right equipment.  A viewpoint supported by the fact that many creative people have been willing to create, taking nothing tangible in return.  Perhaps they have way too much energy when they first start out, but the quality usually falls off when they reap no fruits from their efforts.

How are we going to compensate those rare or creative individuals who truly produce things that people want to listen to, read, and view?  In fact I've never figured out how we are going to pay for the Internet.

The Approaches Tried

First approach, why fix it?  Let it run pretty much the way it is now. Everything done on a purely voluntary basis.  In which case you'll reap occasional flashes of some truly creative work surrounded by tons of really mediocre "stuff."

Or, a possible means for getting funding might build on the mechanisms of the past.  For instance, funding could be derived much like radio and television productions, where  corporations pay for commercial time as a means of getting people to buy their products.  This mechanism abounds today.  Hence a lot of
those nasty nuisance screens.  Unfortunately, it's very hard for the advertising folk to get their hands around the profitability demographics. Apparently they assume that they will take care of that in the future.

Alternatively, perhaps our future editor could sell subscriptions where a tribe pays in advance for access to a product, much the way of hard copy pulp magazines of today.

Another tack might take the "freeware" approach, using the Internet to advertise, giving people a free sample of wares.  Thus enticed, the readership would visit the site, pull out their credit card and buy "completions" and maybe lots of all the other stuff.  This, too, is in use now, in a limited but increasing way, the bottleneck being credit security.

And what of government and corporate sponsored grants?  That was in heavy use originally, but now seems declining.

The Reader

All this brings us to the third group in the zine landscape, the readership. Most love to read new things that challenge them in some capacity, but are they willing to invest money in art so that they might see these new things? The viewing technology costs.

Regardless, the purpose of readers is to read, and read they must, or all else is for nothing!

So what's it going to be?  Occasional flashes of some truly creative work, surrounded by tons of really mediocre work, or the fullest expression of all that is best in art?  It's up to you.  The future and the past meet in the present.  Thus has it always been, and thus shall it ever be.

--

"Klaatu Barada Nicto" - The Day The Earth Stood Still
 

Bill Burns
1-9-1999 0735
William C. Burns, Jr.
Millenium Artist
sunhawk@greenville.infi.net
http://members.tripod.com/~Rukesayer/index.html