Chapter 1: A History of Information Highways and Byways

The Social Role of Writing and Publishing
pp. 13-26

To understand the evolution of the Internet, we also need to understand the social role that communication, in the form of writing and publishing, has played historically. Although a thorough analysis of writing and publishing is beyond the scope of this chapter, we hope the following historical vignettes help to provide a sense of the antecedents to Web publishing and the use of the Internet to store and disseminate information.

Our use of communications technology is an extension of the development of speech, reading and writing. Over time we have developed sophisticated tools for enhancing the basic communications acts implicit in these three related skills. The use of computers and the Internet is simply our latest aid to enhanced human communication. Although computers are used widely, many people still think of them as having emerged solely from the realm of engineers and computer programmers--and thus as machines that exert a disembodied and faintly bureaucratic influence on our daily lives. This anxiety comes primarily from the misconception that the machinery in some mysterious way has a life and mind of its own.

This fact was not lost on Norbert Weiner, one of the earliest "computer designers" who, in the 1940s, suggested that the computer could be used for more than calculating mathematical figures. In Cybernetics (1948), he likened the anxiety about technology to the moral of Goethe's story "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," where magic is seen as a literal-minded force that can only be controlled by a skilled operator--in this case the magician. In Cybernetics, Weiner argued:

The idea of non-human devices of great power and great ability to carry through a policy, and of their dangers, is nothing new. All that is new is that we now possess effective devices of this kind. In the past, similar possibilities were postulated for the techniques of magic which forms the theme for so many legends and folk tales. . . . In all these stories the point is that the agencies of magic are literal-minded; and that if we ask for a boon from them, we must ask for what we really want . . . and not for what we think we want.39

Many of us who do not have engineering or computer science backgrounds, and who work primarily with word processors, tend to see the power of computers but not their literal-mindedness--except perhaps when we lose a file, and even then we tend to blame the mysterious workings of the computer. When this anxiety is focused on the Internet and magnified by media reports of the dangers that lurk there in the form of stalkers and pornographers, or that anathema to scholars everywhere--inaccurate information--this sense that the machine is more powerful than its operators is magnified.

However, we can see echoes of the same anxiety over social change at other moments in the history of writing and publishing. The changes brought about by new and different media for writing and publishing, as well as the anxiety over the passing of familiar tools and methods, is comparable to what many of us experience when integrating computers and the Internet into the way we work with information. The nature of the Internet "revolution" is not so much that the traditional rules of how we work with information have changed, but that the ideas we have about the nature of information are changing. It is easier to explain changes in history when the social backdrop or foundational ideas remain the same. However, when these change, everyone is thrown into the search for definitions.

A good place to begin exploring the antecedents of the Internet in writing and publishing is to situate our discussion within the cultural myth of the search for perfect language and the breakdown of universal literacy. In many ways, writing and publishing are attempts to transcend the limitations of only being able to communicate with one's immediate group, in "real time," and in one language. The power of this idea can be seen in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In the story, after the flood, Noah's descendants went east and eventually settled on a plain in the land of Shinar. These people shared a common language. They decided to build a city and a tower that would reach up to heaven. God, concerned that these people would become too arrogant, destroyed the tower, scattered the people and, by miraculous intervention, introduced different languages among them, generally creating great confusion. The place where the tower stood was then called "Babel," "because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth."40 Paradoxically, while babel is popularly thought of as chaotic, nonsense speech--as in a "baby's babble"--etymologically, the word means "gate of God."41

As historical fact, the Tower of Babel is hard to verify, though scholars believe that it was a Babylonian ziggurat, possibly started by Hammurabi and located in the southern part of the city of Babylon. As a myth, however, the story is fascinating for its descriptions both of technological innovation and of the loss of universal literacy implied by a common language. The story is remarkable for the juxtaposition of technology and the age-old problem of multiple languages. The Tower of Babel has remained an important cultural metaphor throughout history. Umberto Eco, in The Search for the Perfect Language (1995), explores this idea and its impact on European thought and culture. Eco points to the crossroads between the search for a perfect language and the emergence of a European identity in the eleventh century. In this period, he explains, the awareness of the sheer number of vernacular idioms and dialects stimulated interest in developing a perfect language. Eco also cites a change in the contemporary depictions of the Tower of Babel as an indication of this awareness.42 Up until this period, there had been few pictorial representations of the Tower. After the eleventh century, however, there emerged a wealth of new images. Eco theorizes that the stimulus for this outpouring was a change in public perception about the story that coincided with the cultural and social upheaval in Europe. Eco argues that in this period the story came to be seen not just as an example of divine intervention, but also as an account of a historical event. Large-scale cultural change, appearing to mirror the biblical catastrophe, swept Europe and brought with it a multitude of languages that constituted the beginning of modern European languages.

Jacques Vallee, in The Network Revolution (1982), argues that one of the earliest modern attempts to create a group communication medium took place during the Berlin airlift of 1948, when telex machines from different countries were wired together. The experiment broke down precisely because everyone tried to communicate at the same time in different languages.43 In the age of the Internet, the Tower of Babel myth continues to exert an influence. In his introduction to a Russian-to-English translation program that he has named "The Tower of Babel Project," Stephen Braich, a computer science major at Portland State University, asks:

Can we rebuild the Tower of Babel? With the internet, we are no longer scattered all over the face of the earth. We can communicate with each other and share information much faster than ever imagined. The only barrier still left is language. . . . Imagine what we could accomplish if everyone in the whole world really understood one another.44

Writing in many ways has partially solved the problem of the search for the perfect language. Writing begins to transcend the limitations of time and space and, with translation, even some of the limits of multiple languages. It is remarkable, for example, that we can read today the observation an Assyrian king made over 2,500 years ago, who in turn was reading the observations of an earlier culture. Writing in about 700 B.C., Ashurbanipal, king of the Assyrian empire and an avid reader with an extensive library, reflected: "I read the beautiful clay tablets from Sumer and the obscure Akkadian writing which is hard to master. I had my joy in the reading of inscriptions in stone from the time before the flood."45

While not a technological development, the emergence of speech and language approximately 250,000 years ago created a medium by which ideas could be transmitted and shared. Although speech and language are learned, the development of writing was a technological breakthrough.46 Approximately 40,000 years ago, symbolic visual images appeared on cave walls and began to extend and enhance the range of communication. In ancient Mesopotamia, writing was invented in response to the need to keep accounts and make lists. In Sumer, writing first appeared around 3300 B.C. as a response to the complexity of managing the "movements of personnel, salaries and incoming and outgoing goods and flocks of animals. Since the capacity of the human memory is limited, it became necessary to find a new and unified system of reference enabling oral information to be preserved and recovered later on in spoken form."47

The invention of writing led to the formation of a scribal class. The degree to which this class assumed a critical role in ancient societies can be seen in Egypt. Egyptian scribes held high positions in Egyptian society and had their own god, Thoth. In Egyptian mythology, Thoth is credited with inventing writing. He served as scribe to the other deities--notably as the scribe responsible for writing down the disposition of human souls in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Thoth was also a measurer of time and seeker of truth. Thoth's great power in Egyptian mythology reflected the new influence ascribed to writing.

Furthermore, to borrow an idea from computers, writing became the first dependable storage device for ideas. Starting out as a simple memory aid--a way to keep track of business transactions--writing soon opened the way for histories that extended memory beyond account books. While the first histories were in fact exercises in record keeping and consisted of lists of rulers, law codes, and ritual manuals, historical epics also began to appear, including Gilgamesh (c. 2000 B.C.), the Ramayana (c. 250 B.C.) and the Mahabharata (c. 200 B.C.-A.D. 200).

In the Western tradition, the writing of history is popularly attributed to Herodotus, the Greek historian who wrote of the clash between Europe and Asia that led to the Persian War between 430 and 450 B.C. (It is from his history and that of other early historians such as Xenophon that we have the descriptions of the fire beacons and courier systems discussed previously.) The significance of using writing for preserving history and even as historical artifact was not lost on ancient peoples.

The invention of printing further extended the range of writing and married human production to machines in the process. The earliest known printed text is the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text, from A.D. 868. This was followed by a 130-volume edition of the Nine Classics printed in China between A.D. 953 and 923 by Feng Tao. These early volumes were produced using woodblock printing. Movable type was introduced in China between 1041 and 1049.48

Printing developed later in the West, and the creation of books and libraries took an interesting turn that, as we will see, parallels the development of the Internet. The medieval library and the production of hand-copied texts are especially relevant models for a contemporary understanding of the Internet. The Internet, and especially the World Wide Web, mirrors the joint medieval absorption with the careful preservation and copying of the world's knowledge as well as the exclusivity of a class of cognoscenti. To be literate in the medieval period meant being able to read and write Latin. Only the clerical class could do this: "the association of clerici with litterati and laicus with illitteratus, was a medieval creation."49 This lasted until universities began educating laypersons in the thirteenth century. Then, being literate was reduced "from meaning a person of erudition to meaning a person with a minimal ability to read, albeit in Latin. A clericus was still a litteratus, but he was now neither a churchman nor a scholar: he was anyone who was literate in this minimal sense."50

The World Wide Web mirrors as well the medieval absorption with design and the blending of text and illustration. There is also a parallel between the medieval monasteries' housing of both library and scriptorium (the room where manuscripts were written, copied and illuminated) and the fact that the Internet incorporates both the electronic scriptorium and the library. A closer look at the history of books, libraries and manuscripts from the sixth century to approximately the end of the thirteenth century illustrates these points.

The book trade in the West collapsed with the fall of the Roman Empire. In the sixth century, church bishops in the West began taking control of all church property, including manuscript collections in libraries, which thereafter assumed the status of communal possessions that could be copied and distributed fairly freely. Not only did this process create a means by which texts could be made available in copies to those who wished to read them, but on a more profound level the Catholic Church took critical steps "in adapting to its use the power of the written word. It was not that Latin Christians were beginning to write, but they were now using the written word with sophistication to organize and control their world."51 For the next eight hundred years, books and other texts were copied and disseminated among monasteries by a system dependent on hundreds of monks who acted as scribes.

By the middle of the sixth century, Benedictine monks were required to read daily. This practice of reading contributed to the perception that libraries constituted a natural part of monastic life. This perception was to continue through to the end of the fifteenth century. For example, in 1345, Richard de Bury, the Bishop of Durham, wrote:

The venerable devotion of the religious orders is wont to be solicitous in the care of books and to delight in their society, as if they were the only riches. For some used to write them with their own hands between the hours of prayer, and gave to the making of books such intervals as they could secure and the times appointed for the recreation of the body. By whose labours there are resplendent today in most monasteries these sacred treasuries full of cherubic letters. . . . Wherefore the memory of those fathers should be immortal, who delighted only in the treasures of wisdom, who most laboriously provided shining lamps against future darkness.52

When missionary monks traveled to remote parts of Europe, Britain and Ireland, they took manuscripts with them. When these monks set up monasteries, space for libraries and scriptoriums was also part of the design. Monks traveled to Rome from far-flung monasteries for the express purpose of bringing books back to their monastery libraries.

The manuscript books of this period were inaccessible to all except the clergy and a handful of wealthy laypersons. The books were kept locked in monastery libraries and thus, before 1100, only the clerics were literate. By contemporary standards, monastery libraries were small. Before 1200, most monasteries housed less than a hundred volumes and only a few libraries had collections that exceeded three hundred volumes. This was due in large part to the fact that forty monks, the average number of scribes at work in each monastery, were only able to copy two manuscripts per year. Given the amount of time, energy and financial resources that went into their production, books were too valuable to make available to the general public. Even the Bible was rare outside of monasteries--it took a year to copy one and a parish priest's salary for the year to buy one. The Church did not oppose Bible reading on the part of nonmonastic readers, but neither did it encourage Bible reading for fear of popular interpretations of the scriptures.53 Nevertheless, copying and the creation of these libraries spread Latin high culture from Rome to monasteries located largely in rural Europe--an echo of the Roman network earlier in this chapter.

These themes would be mirrored in the Internet. For almost twenty years the Internet remained the exclusive province a class of technical "monks," who in addition to programming also worked to create a database of literature on the Internet (Project Gutenberg is a key example of this effort). However, these digital "monks," like their medieval counterparts, were only producing for other digitally literate readers. Most of us in the early years of digital literature were completely unaware of these libraries and would have been unable to access them. The fact that medieval manuscripts were expensive and thus inaccessible to the general public was also echoed in the fact that the Internet was originally limited to those who were given access to work on the government-sponsored ARPANET. Only gradually was access extended to universities. However, the issue of "access" was not limited to just being able to log on to the Internet. Here the image of the medieval "public" libraries (as opposed to monastic libraries) is even more appropriate. Just as medieval academics sometimes stood in groups using books chained to library desks, today we vie for limited "public" computer resources at terminals on campus. The notion of expensive and limited resources remains with us in the expense of purchasing a computer, the critical device that allows us to read the material available online. For many of us in the university, this has translated into a desperate effort to get antiquated office computers upgraded to be Internet capable--or, outside the university, into setting up and paying for Internet access.

The copying of manuscripts, as we have seen in Richard de Bury's loving description, was more than an act of simple industry. Thus, while individual monks in the scriptorium might bury small notes in the margins of illustrations complaining of the tedium, the production of these texts was viewed as an act of worship. Today, we think of book illustrations as being distinct from the text. As medieval hand-copied manuscripts became increasingly elaborate, however, illustrations and text blended together in a way that redefined the nature of the book, making it an object of devotion. However, copying out manuscripts also demanded accuracy on the part of the copier. To certify the accuracy of the copy, monks followed an admonition that contained a warning similar to the one St. Irenaeus used with his monks, that on Judgement Day, Christ would judge the living and the dead and the hand-copied manuscripts for accuracy: "You who will transcribe this book, I charge you . . . Jesus Christ . . . will . . . compare what you have copied against the original and correct it carefully."54

In 1345, Petrarch discovered a manuscript containing Cicero's letters Ad Atticum (from which we have the description of the postal system discussed previously) in Verona. Shortly thereafter, Boccaccio discovered Tacitus's works in the monastery of Monte Casino. Their successes stimulated others to search medieval libraries for manuscripts containing additional Greek and Roman texts. Booksellers were also looking for books for wealthy book collectors but encountered difficulty finding the right ones because most of the world's books were in monasteries, which only provided limited access and even more limited cataloging. In most monasteries, books were shelved without anyone knowing or marking where. Libraries responded to these limitations by increasing the size and scope of their collections.

The Sorbonne, established in 1253, reflected many of these changes. By 1289 it had a library catalog of a thousand volumes. It also instituted a set of rules and regulations for library use and chained about 20 percent of its collection so that several patrons at a time could consult a manuscript. However, the majority of such libraries were not as large. For example, in 1424, Cambridge had only 122 volumes in its library.55 A private library at the end of the fifteenth century might contain as many as twenty volumes. Whereas a hand-copied religious manuscript cost a priest's yearly salary, a bound manuscript cost as much money as an average court official received in a month. A scholar or student who was not exceptionally wealthy could acquire books by copying them by hand. In fact, by the thirteenth century, the typical manuscript was not the gorgeous illuminated manuscript produced in the monastery, but a simple hand-written copy made for personal use.

Two new institutions grew up around the universities to provide for the demand for books: stationers and book copiers. Stationers provided paper and kept libraries of textbooks that had been carefully studied and compared to other books for accuracy. They made these books available for copying by students. When a student needed a textbook for a class, he had to go down to the stationers and copy it out for himself by hand or pay a book copier to do it.56 However, while a student might be able to get copies of the books he needed for a particular class, it was harder and sometimes impossible to get copies of other texts that might be required for independent research. Additionally, copying could not always keep pace with the demand for books. As copies were made, the copiers--who were not working under the admonition that they would be judged for their work on Judgement Day--made mistakes that were reproduced as books were made from copies of copies.

When Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type to the West in 1455, European libraries changed significantly. Printing spread so rapidly throughout western Europe that by 1600 new presses had issued thirty thousand separate titles totaling twenty million volumes. For a time libraries--like their patrons--continued to favor hand-copied Latin manuscripts, but between 1450 and 1600 Europe experienced a series of social and cultural shifts that greatly influenced the dissemination of printed materials.

A highly literate and growing middle class emerged along with the capitalist economies in Europe. This new class demanded access to information. It is not uncommon these days to hear someone say that the Internet is as significant a development as Gutenberg's movable type. This parallel is striking on many points. The significance of Gutenberg's invention is that the printed word was no longer the strict domain of those who could afford the price of a hand-copied book.

Not only was the publishing process speeded up, but also multiple editions were possible. Gutenberg's invention created a revolution in publishing. The relationship of technology, machines and book production was not lost on Gutenberg, who included the following note in a book he printed in 1460: "this noble book Catholicon . . . without the help of reed, stylus or pen, but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types has been printed and brought to an end."57

The mechanical innovation of printing not only widened the audience for books, but also changed the act of reading. In the early sixteenth century, being able to memorize passages from essential texts was a critical part of education and an indispensable aide in argument and comparison. The invention of printing and the modern book, the proliferation of private libraries and increased access to books meant that sixteenth century readers could begin to rely on the book's "memory" rather than their own. Gadgets were built around this idea of books as "reference tools." Agostino Ramelli, an engineer, invented a "rotary reading desk" in 1588, which permitted a reader to have access to ten different books at once, each open to the required chapter or verse.58

While Gutenberg's invention revolutionized publishing and reading, it was not without its critics. In De Laude Scriptorum (1492)--literally, "In Praise of Scribes"--John Trithemius argued that "printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices . . . the simple reason is that copying by hand involves more diligence and industry."59 Trithemius noted--correctly--that the hand-copied books would last longer than those printed on paper. He also noted that scribes were more careful than printers were. However, these points aside, Trithemius was not a Luddite; in other documents it is clear that he used printed books. Rather, De Laude Scriptorum documents his sorrow at the passing of a way of life embodied by the monastic scriptorium. Trithemius, like Richard de Bury, viewed copying manuscripts as a spiritual labor:

In no other business of the active life does the monk come closer to perfection than when caritas drives him to keep watch in the night copying the divine scriptures. . . . The devout monk enjoys four particular benefits from writing: the time that is precious is profitably spent; his understanding is enlightened as he writes; his heart within is kindled to devotion; and after this life he is rewarded with a unique prize.60

To illustrate his point, Trithemius tells the story of a monk who was such a passionate copyist that many years after they buried him, it was discovered that his three writing fingers had been miraculously preserved.61

Trithemius was not alone in his resistance to print. Some of the resistance was due to the quality of the hand-copied manuscript compared to the cheapness of the printed book. Thus, for example, in the late fifteenth century, Vespasiano da Bisticci, in his memoir of Duke Federigo of Urbino, observed that in the duke's library "all books were superlatively good and written with the pen; had there been one printed book, it would have been ashamed in such company."62

This resistance to printing presses illustrates an important theme: the perceived purity of an old technology over a new one. This has been a recurring theme in computer folklore as well. Some computer programmers speak of "neat" programming and "transparent" programming, or the idea of using tools that are "closest" to the machine's soul--for example, the Vi, Emacs and Pico text editors (used to create and edit files in UNIX). This often speaks of a sentimentality that is not limited to a need for fast and efficient ways to use computers. While many of us do not share this sentimentality because we have exclusively used programs like WordPerfect that place many layers of "user-friendly" interface between us and the machine, we also can be sentimental about the first word processing programs we used, like "WordStar." For programmers, the real divide is between people who use "high-level" means of speaking to a computer and those who work in "machine language." Thus, by analogy, Microsoft Word is looked upon as a printing press, whereas UNIX-based text and file editing programs are seen as handwriting.

Just as Trithemius and other scriptors mourned the passing of an era, so have contemporary computer nerds. Internet newsgroups like Classic Macs are heavy with sentimentalism for now obsolete computers. At no other time in history has there been such a fast recycle rate of goods, with the absurd result that we observe a mourning process every six months.

Then as now, there were arguments for employing both the old and new technologies. "Pico" is still on our top-ten list of usable programs; hand-copying, for reasons that went beyond luxury and style, was practiced after the adoption of the printing press. For example, Julius II, best remembered as Michelangelo's patron, while still a cardinal had a printed book hand-copied. The book in question was Appian's Civil Wars and the cardinal had a copy made in 1479 from an edition printed in 1472. The reasons for this apparent aberration, and for others like it during this period, are twofold. First, some people preferred the luxury of the handmade object over the utility of the mass-produced one. Second, and more important, hand-copying allowed one to get books that were not in print, and also to have specific texts that reflected one's particular needs assembled in one volume.63 Our modern photocopied course packets reflect the same need for a specific and individualized collection of texts. The power of the Internet in this regard is its ability through hyperlinks to endlessly assemble "electronic codexes" for us. James J. O'Donnell, in his study of the transition from hand-copied to printed texts in the medieval period, extends this idea further by arguing that "we now praise electronic texts for their malleability in this way, forgetting sometimes that the relative stasis, not to say intransigence, of the printed book is the anomaly in the history of the written word, and that user-made anthologies are the norm."64

It is no coincidence that the surge of interest in books also spawned resistance. The earliest known call for press censorship was from Niccolo Perotti, a classical scholar who was upset with shoddy classical editions that were being printed in Rome. In 1471, Perotti wrote a letter to the pope asking for a system of prepublication censorship to be established to ensure that future editions were carefully edited. The first official Church censorship came in 1559 with the publication of the Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum ("Index of Forbidden Authors and Books"). The purpose of this index was to guide censors in their decisions on which publications to authorize and which to disallow. (Although printers no longer worked exclusively in monasteries, they were not free to publish books without official permission.)65 This censorship is particularly interesting because it reflected an anxiety that went beyond ferreting out heresy or lewdness. It came about because the sudden surge in the sheer numbers of books and the ease by which they could be produced (compared to hand production) profoundly challenged existing methods of reading. This mistrust was not new; there is evidence of such mistrust with hand-copied texts as well. For example, Nicholas of Lyre, in his second prologue to the literal commentary on the Bible, was mistrustful of the limited hypertexting of the glossed manuscript page and complained: "They have chopped up the text into so many small parts, and brought forth so many concordant passages to suit their own purpose that to some degree they confuse both the mind and memory of the reader and distract it from understanding the literal meaning of the text."66 Texts produced by other cultures--for example, the ancient cultures of Central America--were burned. Diego de Landa, bishop of Yucatan in the sixteenth century, justified the burning of books there by explaining that despite the fact that the books were beautiful, they were filled with superstitions and "falsehoods of the Devil." However, it is relatively easy to see how the multiplicity of texts reproduced quickly on printing presses created a crisis over interpretation. Walter Ong explains:

Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. . . . By and large, printed texts are far easier to read than manuscript texts. The effects of the greater legibility of print are massive. The greater legibility makes for rapid, silent reading. Such reading in turn makes for a different relationship between the reader and the authorial voice in the text and calls for different styles of writing. . . . Manuscript culture is producer-oriented. . . . Print is consumer-oriented.67

The Church responded to the threat of increasing numbers of interpretations that could be applied to any given body of doctrine by preventing the publication of these conflicting interpretations.

O'Donnell has noted the relevance of this resistance to our current predicament with the Internet. If one looks "for the history of resistance to the new technology in that period, we can gain some advantage of perspective on controversies in our own time, when it is far from clear to many people that the revolution that is upon us will be a benign one."68

Before moving from the history of publishing to the development of computers, it is important to look at another resistance movement--that of the underground press--for how it has contributed to the publishing culture of the Internet. One of the more striking examples of the underground press are the revolutionary broadsides and pamphlets published during the eighteenth century in the American colonies. The British government suppressed many of the seminal works of the American Revolution, such as Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and systematically broke colonial presses and revoked printers' licenses. Despite this suppression, we can find examples of the power of technology and human inventiveness from this period. British presses were licensed until 1815, but licensing proved impossible to enforce when the printing technology changed from wooden presses to iron ones. Hundreds of wooden presses were literally dumped, found their way onto the market and were bought by so-called "radical" organizations. The wooden presses had a distinct advantage over their iron counterparts--they could be dismantled and moved quickly. Marc Demarest notes that the power of the underground press in Britain was indisputable by 1819. While a reputable upper-middle-class journal like Blackwood's might sell four thousand copies per issue, a radical and illegal working-class journal like Black Dwarf could sell roughly twelve thousand copies per issue.69

Samizdat, Russian for "self-publishing," refers to the more contemporary practice of distributing materials by way of underground channels. It originally referred to the underground distribution of banned books in the Soviet Union and was coined by dissidents after the old Russian revolutionary practice, from the days of the czarist censorship, of circulating uncensored material privately, usually in manuscript form.70 Samizdat has been described as "not only the 'whispered grapevine,' but also a kind of human association and a service between friends."71 By the early 1980s, within the Soviet Union and Soviet-bloc countries, samizdat was an underground institution represented by an extended network of literary groups and small workshops that produced their own editions. For many authors samizdat editions were literally the only way they could get their work published. In Hungary, when sociologist Miklós Haraszti's study of the state of the Hungarian working class was banned, samizdat editions were circulated. In Czechoslovakia, Josef Kroutvor recalls this network:

In this way all sorts of people wrote at least something or copied the texts of their friends and colleagues on typewriters. Writing was a kind of cultural mania, in some cases leading to an almost uncontrollable urge to write. . . . The period of samizdat was not only one of writing and copying, but also of reading, the adventure of reading. In this way the whole of my generation harmed its eyesight a little, reading badly carbon-copied manuscripts and illicit photocopies.72

Another self-publishing venture that is worthy of note is the "'zine." These popular and often self-obsessed limited editions are descendents of the fan magazines or "fanzines" of the 1940s. However, Fred Wright argues that "in spirit they also hearken back to other, older self-publishing ventures of independent spirit and vitality such as American broadsides from Revolutionary days, Russian Samizdat material, Dada and other avant garde art and social movements' magazines."73

In the mid-1980s thousands of limited-edition photocopied 'zines were produced, often by bored temporary workers using company computers and photocopy machines. 'Zines were tracked by Factsheet Five, a 'zine that covered the 'zine scene. By 1995, Factsheet Five's editor estimated that there were between twenty thousand and fifty thousand different 'zines. While many of these were in-your-face publications with titles like Asian Girls Are Rad and Fat Girl, others focused on personal obsessions, such as Balloon Animals and European Trash Cinema. With the advent of the Internet, many of the 'zines gravitated to the Web. One description of the 'zines reads as follows: "They were harbingers of the highly personalized culture that now thrives on the Internet; and the ease of creating and distributing World Wide Web home pages may eventually render the zine medium a nostalgic remnant of print culture."74

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