Scrapbooks and Zines

Katriel and Farrell contribute a lot of sufficient information to our conversations about everyday writing. They spend a lot of time discussing the component activities in scrapbooking, which are generalized as "saving, organizing, and contemplating and sharing". While these are common activities in scrapbook making and keeping, individual scrapbook makers chooses freely how they construct their scrapbooks, and what they do with them. Katriel and Farrell highlight the theme of scrapbook being a "genre of self". Scrapbook makers can choose what to include in their scrapbooks, which falls under the category of "saving". People commonly hold onto items for their scrapbooks, for example, somebody may save a card they received from a close friend in high school. This person may then include that card in their scrapbook that they made for their high school years. It is the individual's decision of what to include in their scrapbook. Individuals are also free to organize their scrapbooks however they desire. Scrapbooks tend to be structured in a collage type form, but it is the individual scrapbooker that gets to choose how to arrange items on a page, what materials to use, whether to use sequential order or not, etc. This goes along with the "genre of self" theme. "Contemplating and sharing" includes the audience aspect, as scrapbook makers are inclined to share their creation with other people, or keep it to themselves. Katriel and Farrell highlighted the idea that people tend to share their scrapbooks with others only if the other people are either included in the scrapbook, or they really do "care", which is usually close friends or family. If the potential audience does not "care" enough to look at the scrapbook, the scrapbook maker most likely will not show it to them. Scrapbook makers are also inclined to reminisce on "fun" events in the past by looking back at their scrapbooks, even if they are by themselves. Some scrapbook makers construct their scrapbooks with a mindset that people will be looking at them. While scrapbooking has developed into a genre, people have the freedom to construct them and share them as they will, which creates a so-called "genre of self". This goes hand-in-hand with our conversations about everyday writing, highlighting on ideas such as audience, exigence or purpose, and genre. Scrapbooks and Zines are somewhat similar in the sense that they allow the creators to choose freely how to construct them, and they both have purposes. I believe that they are both examples of everyday writing.