[spectre] Drumeva’s eye-aching clickaholic trip into Bulgarian e-zines

[zankov@altern.org]

E-stories.
        
       Elena Drumeva’s eye-aching clickaholic trip into Bulgarian e-zines.
How deep the rabbit hole goes…deep.
        
      Incidental click. *bpm. Bits of their minds. Their: of shmir,
Kaladan, cu, xochipilli. Wanna meet the nicknames in person. Click
through intimate content...he lay in plaster, in shite, helpless for
three months...the sticky discovery of your own uselessness...your
chained sterile imagination...his heavy body slumped over me... Uneasy
feeling I’m late for class. Click. 
      Blurred urban images. Zone for cyber culture...
being.john.ginevich... Clever. Play on words...the open source
person...Guilty feeling I’m late for class. Click-click. 
      Read no story till the end. My attention is a picky customer. Feel
slightly cheated by a hot teaser and a bland dessert. Click-click-click. 
      I think they are the best. They thought they had something to say
to the world and sat down and wrote it and uploaded it. I know about 17
people who feel they can make a great contribution to humanity if only
they could get themselves to sit in front of a computer and organize
their thoughts. 
      These kids do it. 
      I intensely wonder why. The returns seem to be a questionable
amount of glory and intellectual delight for all I can think of. Cash is
not a factor. 
      I envy them. 
      So that’s how the e-zine story starts. 
      I want to write about those street philosophers underground artists
virtual personas and their new medium of communication. I want to
document the snapshots of their cyber/urban reality for humanity. 
      Run a search on “e-zine” in all Bulgarian search engines I know.
Matches found outnumber my boldest expectations. Click-click-click.
E-zines that do not look very certain exactly what they are doing online.
Shut them up. E-zines that breathe pixels and feed on flash 5.0.
Home-made. 
      Copy-paste URL’s in a folder for further reference. Contact the
authors. E-mail, ICQ, GSM, night trains. Cafes at Centralna Gara Sofia
are cold and slimy. 
      Three weeks, tens of conversations and hundreds of clicks later.
I’ve met a 50-year-old lady, a journalist who doesn’t leave his desk and
produces an A3-page of content in 40 minutes, a tableful of top managers
and administrators who talk about tits and TEC Maritsa Iztok equally
passionately, a wild-eyed madman of an artist, a young man whose online
activities prevented him from noting the fact that Parvanov won the
election.
      I realize I don’t want to be comprehensive. I have nothing to tell
you about an e-zine that feels like a newspaper, only it makes your eyes
go dry and red and cannot be consumed in the toilet. It serves the Varna
hardcore community, its author’s graphomaniac fits, or women who  are
interested in alternative medicine and the healing power of apples. It is
print gone online because it’s a low-risk low-price venture. Offline
wouldn’t hurt. 
      This is a story about novel minds, novel ideas, novel forms of mass
communication. It is about some 20-year-old people who set their own
rules. Creators of reality, rather than consumers. I somehow feel more
confident about the future of this country. 
        
      ThE charactEr sEt
      When the time comes to open the URL’s folder and dig out the
webmasters’ contact info, certain names pop up with remarkable frequency.
I start to smell something fishy.
       
       Smells of team spirit. 
      “1997-1998, web design was the thing,” miss jezabelle starts to
build the puzzle. “Everybody was making homepages. So I made myself a
homepage to put my t-shirt designs. esem stumbled upon it, sent me an
e-mail “that’s very nice” and we kicked off an active communication.
ivgin is a schoolmate. georgivar is a classmate of ivgin, who got hooked
up because of ivgin. ivgin dug up Kaladan form somewhere…” 
       
      The somewhere happens to be a chat channel where ivgin was trying
to attract attention to himself for lack of anything better to do. “I
started nagging, overwhelming the chat, line after line,” ivgin recalls.
“I thought I could stupefy the lamers with my typing speed. Then Kaladan
picked up the challenge and we had an incredible first night together –
we chatted Faithless, Egoist magazine, lasagna…” 
      “…Gradually we synchronized our standards and ideas of web design
and we are a very closed community, ten people at most,” miss jezabelle
counts on her fingers.
      They even have common bookmarks: http://www.K10k.net,
http://www.halfproject.com, http://www.designiskinky.net.  
      They sniff the web for fresh ideas, drop the author a message to
the effect they think he is quite great, investigate him and eventually
suck him in the circle. Or at least have him in mind for a joint venture
or two. 
      In alphabetical order: all_losers, esem, georgivar, ivgin, Justine,
Kaladan, miss jezabelle, pro_01, yopn.stelf and the phreedom.org crew –
everyone on the list knows at least three other from the list at least
virtually and is involved in more than one project. 
      “You can group them according to which school they went to,”
yopn.stelf plays clever, “if you are so obsessed with classification.”
      A web ring of people who get pissed off - by dull web design, a
spelling mistake in the undergrUOnd [corrected in due time], stupid
nicks, the Bulgarian Telecommunications Company. 
      Cannot just let go. Cannot shrug their shoulders. They feel
personally responsible to do something about it. 
      They get bugged and bug people. They rave and rant. 
      They have a mission. It might be developing a cyber culture among
the Bulgarian population which still thinks Internet is mp3 and free
porn. It might be promoting alternative forms of art. It might be
educating web developers.  
       
      Mostly they do it nights. 
      They are active users of Coca-Cola, fast food, coffee and Saridon.
      They are yuppies. Target-oriented. All headed for somewhere. It
doesn’t matter where. It is with determination and confidence. Get toxic
Friday and Saturday, still keep Monday in mind.
       
      “One thing is for sure,” Kaladan dares a generalization, “we are
workaholics. We work 15 hours a day.” And they cannot work on just one
project. 
      They share a chatter’s past. Their nicks usually are a long story.
      They are Very Internet People (VIP). Copyright: esem: “…very often
they are Very Introvert People. They don’t want you to love them, hate
them, annoy them, ingratiate them and occupy yourself with their persona.
The VIPs are only interested in what you think of their works, not of
them. If you are here to dig into my life and person, you are nothing but
an intruder. Fuck off.” 
      Around a pizza table, I have an eerie feeling physical
presence/appearance is absolutely irrelevant for them to communicate. I
am positive they perceive each other on a purely intellectual level.
       
      ThE rulEZ of the gamE
      “We are nothing else but an e-zine,” July attempts to set the
parameters of an e-zine for me. “The ideology of the e-zine is that it is
free, you write whenever you feel like it, no deadlines to ca...” This is
where Carlos wildly interrupts to clear the issue – whybulgaria.com is
everything but an e-zine. “By definition an e-zine is updated once a
month or a week and comes in issues that have a topic and all the stuff
that a regular print magazine has.” This is where he is made to shut up. 
      “We don’t care if somebody reads it or not,” Zaro throws in. “If
somebody does read – great. The idea is to be able to publish ourselves
when something plagues us.” 
      [define users: whybulgaria gang: 30-something year old Bulgarian
success stories; professionals who insist their home address be Bulgaria;
if censored, would lead conversations comprised of prepositions and
auxiliary verbs; the only option for immigration seriously considered -
Cuba] 
      A few Bulgarian e-ziners have a clear idea of what an e-zine is.
Those who do, do not exactly agree with each other. Some never intended
their site to be an e-zine. Some heard the word for the first time from
me. At one point of limit-pushing, ivgin, creator of *bpm, reached the
conclusion that a simple homepage, if updated with original material and
visited more than once is an e-zine. 
      [define user: ivgin: can (and does) write a deep probing piece on
Makao cornflakes; generates suspense in one-line e-mails; tries to be
good and cheerful all the time; famous for a “permanent idiotic grin”]
      At another, much later point, I realize the utter futility and
irrelevance of trying to classify and establish criteria. Ideas are not
to be bothered with trivialities. The e-medium in Bulgaria is still too
young and spontaneous and self-searching to be formatted into definitions
and patterns. A few keywords – update, original writing, focus,
community, interaction – set the rough frame in case you need one.  
      “An e-zine is typically born because people strongly want to share
their opinions on all kinds of issues,” Justine Toms of New Media E-zine
makes it really simple. “If they can do that regularly and they do it on
the web, they become an e-zine,”  
      [define user: Justine: impregnable corporate veneer; three MA’s –
pedagogy, French literature, philosophy; the only medium she has not
explored: television; master of succinct business replies]
      What sets an e-zine apart from all other web formations is the
focus. “The most important thing is to have a unifying idea, a
principle,” explains Kaladan, who took over *bpm when it became clear
ivgin was short of time. “That’s what will keep people coming back – the
particular kind of content they know they will get. Good design will keep
them in those five crucial seconds when the average user decides should
he stay or should he go. Good, narrowcasted content will keep them coming
back.”
      [define user: Kaladan: takes night shifts on *bpm except when his
girlfriend is in, in such a case, works by 11 p.m.; editorially
preoccupied with the right choice of words I am going to write that story
in; works undercover on two websites that fill some gap in the net, only
two people know he is the author] 
      “If I have an e-zine on the sexual intercourse of turtles, I cannot
publish a story on the mechanism of a traffic light. Otherwise I become a
portal. It’s that simple,” HIT.BG’s esem has a talent for sorting things
out in your head with one blow of a sentence.     
      [define user: esem: emits a hacker vibe; smooth, fast and furious;
Halden Caulfield; elevator time to reach the 18th office floor appears to
be a serious waste for him; hard to catch his attention; has a
well-argumented theory for all minute things in life, like why you should
(not) take a turtle for a pet; has his MENSA certificate on his homepage,
IQ = 172] 
        
      ThE big dEal
      An excerpt form Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”
Strike out “software” and “developer.” Eric Raymond is someone with a
finger in the Open Source pie. 
      “1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's
personal itch.
      “Perhaps this should have been obvious (it's long been
proverbial that ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’) but too
often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at
programs they neither need nor love. But not in the Linux world --
which may explain why the average quality of software originated in
the Linux community is so high.”
      Scratching a personal itch: 
      July, statement 1: “We have opinions. We want to express them. You
sit down and write because something bugs you too much. And it is so
incredibly cheap to express your opinion. We don’t have to write. We just
write. Also, this is a good way to find people who think like you.”
      July: statement 2: “Vanity is the word – everybody wants to see how
others judge his thoughts.”
      ivgin, statement 1: “Sometimes I feel great urge to write things.
It's almost like the need to pee.” 
      ivgin, statement 2: ”I guess glory is not totally out of the
question.” [famous “idiotic grin”]
      Kaladan, elaboration on ivgin: “People start to write when they see
others write. It flatters the ego to see your name spelled in public.”
      Kaladan, word of warning: “The fundamental thing is to do it just
because you like it. Don’t set a goal. Don’t think you are great.”
      ABE, member of *bpm: “I got into *bpm because of my girlfriend and
I liked the people. They are different because they have something to
say. I wanted to see for myself if I could intrigue them. I actually
still prefer print mags. *bpm is just another channel of expression.”
      esem, the Statement: “It starts with a desire to say something to
someone other than yourself. Or at least to say it out loud.”
      If a tree falls down in a forest and nobody hears it, has it made a
sound?
      “So what’s the big deal?” iMAGESTORIES’ miss jezabelle clears her
throat for a long talk. “If I go past the art-for-art’s-sake argument,
which is real, no doubt, I am a web designer, I want to see my things
published.”
      [define user: miss jezabelle: initiates ICQ-conversations with
inarticulate “psst” and “bjjt”s instead of a cliched “hi;” collects bits
of Internet gossip that prove false upon verification ;); buys magazines
that are meant to be looked at, reads only readers’ letters in Vanity
Fair.]
      “You have minimal input, about 1000 times less than what you need
to start a print magazine. If it fails, you don’t go broke or something.
But if it works, you become an institution. [twinkle in the eye] Actually
you become the boss of that institution. You are someone in the net.
Then, portfolio, CV, you know, it helps.
      “And when the site has built a name for itself, the users get
motivated [:))] – they have a good chance to build a name for themselves
or at least get noticed. iMAGESTORIES has a renome. People get on the
seventh heaven when their .jpg gets an iMAGESTORIES ID number. They
strive to get approved. They progress. That means we help someone
develop. Slowly we are becoming an institution.
      [behind the corner of the coffee cup] “The perspective of actually
influencing people, telling them that’s cool, that’s uncool is tempting.”
       
      VEry IntErnEt PEoplE 
      “Print out a *bpm essay,” Kaladan says, “and it’s no longer *bpm.
Take it with you in bed, it is not *bpm.”
      Reading online is a whimsical affair. In comes an e-mail form your
brother in Australia. In comes a message on the ICQ. Switch your mind to
multi-window mode of operation. In comes another message on the ICQ. This
page is too slow to load. Open a new one in the meantime...”spot a link,
click, the next link, and the next one,” georgivar picks it up. georgivar
is the only VIP who does not make a living out of the Internet. He
explores it systematically out of academic love for knowledge and says he
may know some things better than the professionals. “The web is for
dreamers. The online experience follows exactly the way the thoughts
ramble – you never know where you started and where you will end.”
      [define user: georgivar: dark persona; uses ICQ to probe questions
like: Do you think insane people know they are insane? defines himself as
“freelance insane;” offline quiet to the point of invisibility; Bulgarian
spelled in latin letters disturbs him immensely]
      For all the above reasons, “take the text you wrote for an e-zine
and cut half of it, even if it is only 100 words,” georgivar is not
kidding. “There is a strong possibility that it will get even better
after that.”
      Short sentences, standardized paragraphs, align left. Two screens
is the maximum length of a story. Otherwise the chance that anyone will
read it, drops to 10 per cent, according to some statistics esem found. 
      The VIPs celebrate the web as a communication medium. 
      A most obvious implementation of the idea, [Zet_Mag] is part of a
larger project, Ctrl_Z, that exploits Internet to the extreme – online
radio, online television, e-zine, maili