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The idiocy of the new, revisited

Last week arrived on my desk the latest issue of Folio, the trade magazine serving the magazine industry. Glued to its cover is a one-page advert which proclaims "We're Giving Away a Kindle! (And updating our database...)," illustrated by a photograph of Amazon's new book surrogate gadget, placed atop a bound volume of an actual book.

Folio serves a broad spectrum of magazine publishers, many of them business-to-business titles for whom the magazines they publish are really long-form adverts for the tradeshows they produce, which are their real profit centers. Folio has also just spun off a new title devoted to the proposition that magazines will find new and exciting profits and possibilities online.

Which, y'know, is either a sore subject or an opportunity, depending on what part of what day you talk to me.

At the same time I have just this morning been reading a diary entry on the daily kos website talking about West Virginia politics and sociology, the extent to which cable TV and high-speed internet access does and does not penetrate that and other largely poor places.

Under any circumstances I think it's kind of idiotic for Folio to be giving away and embracing a piece of technology which has as its avowed aim the end of print as we know it (with apologies to one-time RayGun magazine art director David Carson).

But far more to the point I am endlessly frustrated by the herd mentality within the American business community. We have constantly downgraded magazines (and publications in general) ever since MTV and Spy and USA Today introduced short-attention-span journalism. With pretty pictures.

Fine.

That doesn't mean everybody has to be like that. It doesn't mean you have to design publications only for the lowest possible common denominator. It surely doesn't mean people should be encouraged to read -- and think -- less.

And, one more time: the digital music revolution has done nothing more than transfer the profits made from the production of music from record labels and into the hands of the manufacturers of the playback machinery, who have in their favor planned obsolescence and the unplanned certainty that new technology will quickly make outmoded whatever gadget they presently sell, forcing consumers to buy yet another fancier gadget.

Anything else we pretend the digital music revolution has accomplished is either temporary or propaganda.

I'm not saying the web is irrelevant. I'm just saying it's different, that it performs a separate and distinct function which -- if publishers tend to their knitting -- can mesh with the printed word, but should not be permitted by the unthinking bean counters with corner offices to gut the publishing industry.

Discuss at your leisure.

Posted by grant on May 13, 2008 9:42 AM | Permalink

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