Rachel Rubin, the author, wrote this essay to show a way that Asian Americans try to break from the norms of what the American culture see them as. This way was through the publication of zines on paper and Internet to publicize their intents. By introducing the history of Asian American prejudice, she gives a good argument of how Asian Americans used the new technological advancement at that time which was the Internet as a tool of self-portrayal.
“While there are hundreds of paper zines being published, cyberzines are proliferating even faster, because they are even cheaper to produce, there is no need to worry about distribution at all, and the potential audience is practically limitless.”(p.15) Internet allowed Asian Americans to truly express themselves as who they are and not just passive and well-behaved foreigners. The Asian Americans that represented the model minority didn’t represent the Asian Americans who were struggling against “language barriers, poverty, racism”(p.19) With cyberzines, these Asian Americans can express and identify themselves by drawing pictures or copy and paste existing images from the Internet to create cheap zines to share with the public.
In Rubin’s essay, she repeatedly uses the word “cyberzines”. The compound of this word consist of “cyber” and “zine”. “Cyber” is used to represent the Internet and things that are related to it because they are very abstract such as virtual reality. “Zine” is related to the word “magazine” but more closely to “fanzine” because zines are more amateurishly made for self-purpose. A concept Rubin brought up was “model-minority” and it means when a society chooses a ethnic minority as an example to other minorities to behave like them. For example, Asian Americans were seen as hard-working, well-educated, and has a good job so they represented the model minority.
Today on the Internet, instead of zines being popular, memes are what people are creating as a way to spread cultural ideas and behaviors. Memes are short, usually one page or picture of a humorous image with some words and it usually have a deep meaning but sometimes it is just a joke to make fun of something like a satire. Memes are all created digitally and I think this idea came from the creation of zines.
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