I have a new post up at MediaShift today, and it focuses on the role of digital media for print magazines that try to provoke public thought and debate on serious issues. I look at Mother Jones and Orion as two examples of the use of digital tools to supplement print editions.
A spread from Orion Magazine.
A great part of writing this piece was the chance to visit with Veronica Barassi, a fellow academic and magazine researcher at the Institute for Contemporary European Studies at Regent’s College in London, about her scholarly work [especially this article (PDF)] on the role of print and digital formats for specifically activist magazines. As I write in the MediaShift piece, she said:
“Even with younger generations, people kept on telling me the importance of keeping the magazines. They wanted that sense of smell, feel, touch,” she said. “It gave them a sense of ownership. It conveyed a feeling of belonging and affiliation with the magazine.”
… Drawing on anthropological research, Barassi also suggested that the transaction involved in selecting and buying a magazine creates a bond between the reader, the magazine, and the magazine’s professed ideals.
“You need that material culture. If you think about human relationships and the creation of human bonds, they need to be created through an exchange of objects,” she said. The exchange of the printed magazine creates a stronger relationship.
I find this aspect of magazines fascinating. What is it about the materiality of print that makes us connect more deeply to a topic, to an editorial voice, to our imagined community of fellow readers? Can we connect as deeply online when we see people’s names and sometimes avatars tied to comments on a magazine’s digitized articles?
I wonder how that sense of connection to other readers will change when magazines more fully integrate social media into their digital editions. As I mentioned last week in my post about my early magazine experiences with the iPad, I have been reading digital replica magazines via the Zinio app, but missed the ability to tweet and post to Facebook the items that I found especially interesting. I’ve become accustomed to that ability on the web.
When digital magazines become more social, it might help us to feel part of the imagined community of fellow readers, just as the print editions do today. Can that be an adequate replacement for the bonds formed through receiving print copies? I guess we’ll have to patiently await the answer to that question. I’ll put that on my research schedule for, oh, 2012 or so.
