How AOL’s Tween-Zine Scene Pioneered the Digital Self
A look back on the playful, intimate, and surprisingly powerful world of ’90s girl zine-makers
In a tiny corner of the internet, behind the periwinkle blue of the AOL “Kids Only” interface, inside chat rooms about NSYNC and Dawson’s Creek, there lived a generation of young women who were coming of age right alongside the World Wide Web. If you were lucky and on the right forums, one of them might have sent you an invitation to subscribe to her self-published, meticulously crafted, and devastatingly beautiful email newsletter. While the public at large opined over how a newly consumer-accessible hyperlink network would reshape their lives and relationships, these young women already knew the answer. In the world of AOL zines, teen girls were teaching themselves computer programming, innovating social networking, and pioneering the art of the digital self.
Chrissy Foster was a 13-year-old with a burgeoning interest in Bettie Page and the underground feminist punk movement known as “riot grrl” when she first found out about handmade, Xeroxed paper zines that she could sign up to have sent to her P.O. box. Since she was already ordering zines off the internet, it wasn’t long before Foster came across “e-zines,” carefully designed email newsletters sent to batch lists of…
