This is a republished version of an article I wrote for the March 2011 issue of ICON magazine. I feel an obvious tinge of hypocrisy posting it online but, hey, I gotta get my work out there just like anyone else. It has been republished with permission. Just pretend you're reading it in print.
Have fun with your Nook -- I'll still be browsing the newsstand.
By R. Kurt Osenlund
What you hold in your hands is a labor of love. Roll your eyes and call me a hopeless sap, but it's true. A whole team of people poured their guts into the content on these pages, and we're more than happy to know that some of it might smudge its way onto your fingers and literally stick with you after you've finished reading. We're pleased with the fact that you can roll up our work and shove it into your purse, fold it in half and slip it into your pocket, or file it away in a stack you might later dust off and revisit. We like that you can touch what we create, and we like that, once you've had your fill, you end your experience not by clicking a tab or minimizing an app, but by very symbolically and very romantically closing a book.
I'm 27 – three months older than Mark Zuckerberg. I'm part of the generation responsible for transferring the vast majority of our media consumption from the page to the screen, whatever dimensions, picture quality and degree of portability that screen may boast. I'm deeply grateful to be a young and hungry professional in the era of digital dominance, if only for the exposure and resources it affords. Any professional advancement I've achieved has come, at the very least, via an e-mail exchange or the cyber-broadcasting of my byline, and in terms of my everyday work, it is virtually impossible for me to fathom how writers and editors got by in the days of analog journalism. It would be like removing every bit of equipment from a quarry worker's arsenal and leaving him with a wee hammer and chisel. I'll admit that about 80 percent of my own media consumption takes place online, and that includes reading the latest national headlines, devouring the latest celebrity scandal, following the work of the writers I admire, and, yes, browsing oodles of material brought to my attention via Twitter and Facebook.
All that said, I will never fall out of love with the printed page, nor should our culture at large. The tactile pleasures of leafing through magazines, newspapers and books are what guided me toward this industry in the first place. And while I know I'm part of the problem, the unrelenting – if gratuitously premature – talk of print media's crumpling demise never fails to jab like a dagger.
When computing all the pessimistic points, specifically in regards to journalism, the key issue I always return to is just that: the issue. Reveling in the point-and-click immediacy, you may well turn to the Web for the newest updates on Gabrielle Giffords and Hosni Mubarak, or peruse the hottest Fashion Week couture while dodging ads and subscription offers in a slideshow on Vogue.com. But never will you find online the distinct, bookended art of a printed issue – an issue with an encapsulated voice, perspective, theme and design. By nature, the Internet is a universe of instantaneous information, and no Web site thrives without delivering near-constant updates. Thus, your experience with a webzine, or with a print outlet's online presence, is never complete. Such a thoroughly modern, Zuckerbergian notion is surely exhilarating to some, and there's no denying the luster of limitless variety or the satisfaction of getting what you want when you want it. But another kind of satisfaction – the gratification of having gathered a concise collection of words and images in the precise manner in which a skilled group intended it to be gathered – is lost online, lost in the sea of lethally efficient and furiously fast data that, however useful and attractive, undermines artistic value in our society.
Since I can practically hear the Apple minions gathering, let's get to the iPad. Sleek, relatively compact and capable of hosting whole publications page by page, the iPad, along with its ilk of also-rans, provides the closest thing we have to the digital re-creation of the issue experience. I think it's a great thing. It's a virtual magazine of magazines, a newspaper of newspapers. Through with the latest edition of
The New York Times? Good for you. You're now free to move about the new
GQ with the swipe of a fingertip. You can still slip it into your purse, if not your pocket. You can carry it with you on public transportation (perhaps the one venue in which the print world has been able to maintain top billing). However, your connection to what you're consuming is still kept at bay, at arm's length. You're still a slave to the dazzling, but imperial and impersonal, Screen. As a writer, I can definitively say that I prefer to hold my work and the work of others in my own two hands. But the true measure of the palpability that's lost in pixelated translation lies with photography.
A few weeks ago, the annual
Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue fell through my mail slot. It might be my single favorite piece of continually printed media. Have you seen this year's beaut? There on the gilded, maroon cover, decked out as if plucked from a Josef von Sternberg movie, are the dashing likes of Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway and James Franco. Pull out the three-panel cover, and the rest of Norman Jean Roy's stunning group photo is revealed: Jennifer Lawrence, Anthony Mackie, Jesse Eisenberg, Olivia Wilde, Andrew Garfield, Noomi Rapace and five others are lined up across a swanky bar, looking out enticingly and beckoning you to pay the cover charge. Inside, the eye candy surges on with, among other things, the requisite portfolio of Hollywood portraits, an aesthetic high point for a publication that delivers a monthly gush of brilliant shots.
Magazines such as this, and even newspapers in all their halftone glory, serve as your personal scrapbooks of the work of supreme contemporary artists, be it original photography or pre-produced imagery collected and compiled for your consumption. It's a privilege, really – for a price that rarely exceeds $6, you're given a catalog of windows into potentially hundreds of different worlds, and you own the art in a capacity that's but one degree from its intended state (an un-doctored print). I run a blog, I manage a weekly publication's Web site, and any breaking picture that “must be seen” will almost always reach my eyes via the Screen. But those who contend that viewing the digital rendition of the photography in
Vanity Fair – or
The New York Times, or
GQ, or
Sports Illustrated or
American Cheerleader – rivals the experience of drinking it in in the real world musn't be trusted. You simply can't beat the sensation of marveling at a printed picture, no matter how many copies of it can be saved to your desktop.
And speaking of copies, the collection is joining the issue as a victim pounded down by the iron fist of the Screen. How lovely that you can bring the whole
Harry Potter saga with you to the beach on your compact Kindle (try not to get any sand in the grooves!), but how sad that you no longer have any use for all seven beautifully beefy volumes, no longer need to to gaze at Mary GrandPré's whimsical, iconic cover illustrations. The advent of digital is unfurling endless opportunities, but it is also robbing us of our possessions, our libraries, our fundamental relationships to spatial objects. Sure, my three-foot-wide archive of the last four years of
Vanity Fair is unwieldy compared the convenience of the search-and-discover archives of VF.com, but how I love what's contained in those three feet, from the glossy design to the editor's letters to the contribution the stark, uniform spines make to the tableau of my office. How I appreciate dusting off an issue and revisiting it, remembering how I felt the first time I scoured its pages. The Screen insists that the media I consume exist not on a shelf or in an office, but in an alternate realm where it can never be held and never be enjoyed at its full sensory potential. Everything around me tells me that I should leap onto the digital train and never look back, but truthfully, I'd rather just step onto a train with a book.
