Gadgetopia

Roger Ebert’s Journal: Fanzines beget blogs: Roger Ebert has a blog now, which is crazy cool in and of itself. This week he talks about how the old world of fanzines preceded the current crop of blogs and perhaps even the Web itself.

I have always been convinced that the culture of sf fanzines contributed heavily to the formative culture of the early Web, and generated models for web site and blogs. The very tone of the discourse is similar, and like fanzines, the Web took new word coinages, turned them into acronyms, and ran with them. Think about it. Science fiction fans in the decades before the internet were already interested in computers, big-time — first with the supercomputers of science fiction myth, and then with the earliest home-built models. Fans tended to be youngish, male, geeky, obsessed with popular culture, and compelled to circulate their ideas. In the reviews and criticism they ran, they slanted heavily toward expertise in narrow pop fields.

Ebert rules.

(Roger Ebert emailed me, not once, but twice. Have I mentioned that recently? Seriously. Twice. Two friggin’ emails.)