Scrawled in Wax

How will the cultural function of the magazine change as the magazine as a cultural artefact changes?

Recently, Tim Maly twittered a link to an older post on experiments in the conception of the magazine. Near the beginning of the post is the caption “we broke your businesses. now we want your machines”. This seems as good a place to start as any.

The argument, unsurprisingly, is that if the business model of print undergoing change, then the next logical step is that the web will claim and then reshape the means of production. It’s not that the web really wants the machines of print. It that it wants to invent new ones.

I’m not sure what I was drinking on that particular day, but this mention of ‘machines’ made me immediately jump to how philosophers Deleuze and Guattari used the word. One of D&G’s big ideas was that binary, dualistic thinking meant we frequently see objects and ideas as distinct and separate rather than considering them in light of all the other things that go into both making and sustaining their existence. The machine is an assemblage of numerous parts that all work together and so, to D&G, it worked as a good metaphor to reconsider the interconnectedness of stuff, of how physical and social relations all worked interdependently.

Magazines are a pretty good example of this. Think about it for a sec and you’ll see that there are variety of things that went into the magazine arriving at your front door. The paper the magazine is printed on comes from a huge network of forests and pulping and refinenement.The equipment used to print magazines is itself composed of materials – steel, aluminium, rubber, plastic – which all have huge industries behind them. The trucks or trains or planes the magazine was distributed on are connected to huge networks of infrastructure, whether roads,  the electrical system, the petroleum industry or airports. One could go on forever. A magazine is simply one node in a massive network that has no beginning and no end.

But it isn’t just these material networks that sustain the printed magazine; there are cultural machines too. If ‘culture’ is a way of describing the relations between people and the world they inhabit, then the magazine as an artefact performs a kind of cultural function because culture demands it. The magazine works to both constitute reality in a certain way (this here is an article that will tell you something about the world and that is a good thing) but is also itself constituted by cultural forces (we need a form to tell us about the world that is more contemporary than a book but deeper and more rigorous than a newspaper).

Of course, both the material and the cultural networks that sustain magazines are changing. And in that matrix – which in my mind looks like a much bigger version of those molecule diagrams in textbooks – the magazine is but one node sustained by all the other things. And as those other things start to change – to twist and pull and morph into the new things, or simply cease to be – then the magazine is also stretched and pulled,  forcing it to change too.

On ‘the material side’, the very fact of the web means a change in relations of distribution, economics etc. This we know. But what about information and opinion i.e. culture? After all, in much the same way that we flip through newspapers and news sites to appraise ourselves of what is going on in the world, we often turn to magazines to make sense of that world in a broader and more comprehensive sense. We also look to magazines to delve into our own specialised interests.

One can imagine that the latter of these two cultural functions might remain much the same. It isn’t hard to envision Car and Driver or Wallpaper in tablet form; in fact, their reliance on photo and video mean they seem perfectly suited to the Jesus slate and other related products.

But what of ‘making sense’? If the magazine performs a cultural function because of how it fits into a cultural network that periodically requires that someone step back and ‘take stock’ – what will change about that?

‘Cause right now, it seems we still often wait for magazines to proclaim their opinions, even on ‘matters internet’; just as recently as last month, certain parts of the web exploded after NYMag put out a story on the the warm and fuzzy web. Here was a voice from a place of authority – the magazine – speaking about the new. And that isn’t just prejudice; there are a variety of material and cultural machines in place that result in making it difficult to speak at the level of magazine. With all those barriers in place, with all those matrix-al paths to traverse, the magazine still speaks loudly because it takes a lot to have one’s voice heard. If all those trees must be cut, all those salaries must be paid, then you better damn well have something to say if you are to write in one. That overlap of culture and economics means that the really good ideas, the really thought-provoking stuff, only appears there – or at least seems that way.

But anyone who exists in the world of Snarmarkets, Quiet Babylons, 3quarksdailys and a million other sites know that the magazine is no longer the only place to get the good stuff. You can, if you so choose, be drenched in so much smart, brilliant stuff, you may feel compelled to never write again.  If the magazine, bound between two covers,  was once the place for either specialised interests or in-depth thinking about the now, it is no longer the only vehicle for that – and it doesn’t quite seem like the best one either.

So, on the cusp of a historical moment, we are left with a brilliantly optimistic question: what is the magazine?

Because, sure, it may just fade into metpahor, becoming a way of structuring media organisations that perform a loosely similar function online. To me, though, that seems less hopeful. What if, rather, as the social relations to information and opinion change, the magazine becomes, say, a locus of real-time debate, one in which conversation beween smart people becomes a live-for-it’s-not-really-tv spectator sport? Or what if the magazine becomes a curated collection of videos – maybe like Ryeberg; but maybe like Tumblr, where the scattered images are gathered under nothing more than a leading title.

What if the thing we have turned to make sense of our world – to broaden ourselves, to edify ourselves, to ground our perspectives – changes so that, instead being the thing that marks out our place in the world by telling us about it, become the mechanism through which we establish our relationship to the world by doing away with editorial voice? That the screen of the tablet would no longer just metpahorically be a window to the world because you could climb through it and run around?

What if magazines were no longer the thing we wanted to ‘say something’ but, rather, the space through which we spoke ourselves into being?

This is all ludicrously and frustratingly vague, but I’m having trouble seeing past the horizon of form. But what if that lack of answers is precisely what the new machines demand?