works of wanderlust

Remember magazines?

There are still magazines for sale, of course, paper ones… really. I know. I’m looking at some there off to my right even as I sit here writing this—but despite the physical evidence just out of reach from me, I do honestly believe we are clearly past the age of peak periodical. 

I stopped for a coffee in a bookstore this morning and wandered through the magazine rack just long enough to thumb through a few familiar titles before heading for the cafe, a free table, and my phone… which has instant access to roughly fifty downloaded-but-unread issues of various magazines (which I may or may not get around to reading someday) all buried inside apps and services to which I subscribe. 

I remember magazines—and I certainly didn’t need a paper copy.

Oh, but heck if I didn’t used to be the core customer demographic for print magazines, subscribing to WIRED or Runners World delivered by postal mail, hitting up the convenience store for the latest issue of Popular Mechanics or that Playstation magazine that came with a free demo disc, and definitely buying a copy of some text-heavy serious content periodical like The Economist or National Geographic with habitual dedication at the airport before I hopped on any flight. And before you think I’m getting all high and mighty about those particular titles, I definitely still have a stack of MAD back-issues on a shelf in my office.

Yet I cannot actually remember the last time I out and out bought a print magazine.

(And to be honest I looked at the prices and that wasn’t swerving that decision any closer to a sale this morning, either.)

The answer to what happened to magazines is obvious: the internet happened. 

I mean, I’m sitting in a bookstore watching people still queued up to buy print books by the arm-load, but the magazine rack is a ghost town. 

That’s to say, maybe the internet didn’t kill print mediums as much as it just killed print media. 

And of course it did.

I don’t buy magazines on paper anymore, though I’ve bought my share of bound books. But those things aren’t even really equivalents after they? Books vers magazine periodicals? I buy books to have them. I want magazines to use them.

Because sure, I kept a few keepsake issues of those many hundreds perhaps thousands of paper-based magazines that I bought over the decades, but that particular ratio is likely something close to 5-10% tops. On the other hand, I still own at least 80% of the dead-tree books I’ve ever bought, and the other 20% that I have lost track of were almost certainly resold, loaned or given away.

Magazines are, after all, by design transient media. Temporary. Longer-lasting than a newspaper, sure… but not by much. Magazines were always just a means to communicate something that was mostly never meant to endure beyond bursts of momentary information or entertainment. Then? Insert big blurry line here and cross over to the other side to find the realm of more persistent print mediums like novels and other books. (Magazines often try to be books too these days—weightier and collectible—but I would argue that the effort was flimsy and doomed. To most of us, magazines are things we buy, read and then… just toss.)

I collect and read and savour books, but magazines? Far less. Magazines are disposable, fleeting, keep-scrolling kind of media.

And that kind of media, transient and temporary, is really where the internet shines the strongest: short form transient content in a digital on-demand format. Read once and discard. Consume today, gone tonite. Words tangled up with timestamps and best before dates.

Heck, you could even argue that apart from a few differentiating factors—like cost, quality, contributor count, etc—this very website is little more than a kind of digital periodical. And the one place where it is practically the same, sadly, is in readership. Sure I get some traffic, but this site is just as much a ghost town as the periodical aisle three metres to my right.

We haven’t stopped reading magazines I suppose. In fact, arguably the digital equivalent of periodical media is probably in something of a resurgence. My own personal experience is that of reading articles from these kinds of publications almost daily in my news and social feeds.

But as for that floppy bit of glossy paper rolled up and tossed in a bag, sitting in a cafe or on the couch or on a plane reading a bound anthology of that kind of writing? I recall it like a long-lost cozy sweater, but there’s pretty much no way I’m routinely shelling out fifteen bucks for something I have on my phone already—and then I’m going to throw away next week. 

I remember magazines and to be honest I kinda do miss them… but probably not enough to do much more than feel nostalgic about it.