Some people have taken to describing the Internet’s current state as “the attention economy”, where it’s the attention of the casual reader or browser that is the main earner. The logic states that where we spend our attention is where we will spend our money.
This accounts for the popularity and success of boingboing, digg, and reddit – websites where you see a curated collection of things that you might find interesting. The downside of this is that nearly everything on those websites isn’t something new, but rather something that is on the internet in an easily consumable form. The person version of this could be called attention philanthropy. It’s a form of information that you can slurp down whilst sitting in your easy chair, browsing the internet.
I’m not saying I’m browsing the internet from a chakra-enhancing spike, but it’s important to get out and do real stuff occasionally. Not everything should be something that comes in webpage-sized chunks.
This is one of the reasons I like magazines. Magazines are very much like those attention economy websites I mentioned early, except that they are not bound by the drive for new stuff that can be linked to, and that they can create new things. That’s why I’ve been subscribing to a few different magazines this year, looking out for new and interesting things – the sort of thing I won’t hear about on my favourite online hangouts.
One of those magazines was Aesthetica, a magazine based in the UK which covers a high-end cultural remit. I had some big hopes for Aesthetica, but I ended up cancelling by subscription to it today. I couldn’t work out why, but every issue that I picked up wasn’t that engaging. It just seemed to end up buried under a pile of other stuff. It wasn’t until the most recent issue’s article about a show at the MoMa that I realised why – because the author took the time to describe the concept of a readymade.
I’m not going to waste my time describing what a readymade is to you. You’re smart. You already know what a readymade is, and you’d just be bored by my description. But if you were writing an academic essay, you’d throw that description in for context. In the context of this article, however – in an expensive, high-end cultural magazine? It’s not fun to be dragged back to the classroom. Academic writing isn’t entertaining writing, as Paul Graham pointed out recently.
I’m still keeping my eye on the magazine market. I got the new issue of Coilhouse recently, which seems to have a lot of interesting things in it, and The Believer’s collected essays
Interesting links. Services in attention economics could be one of the new shifts in the digital landscape. I find my concordance software very handy for stockpiling and flagging up material relevant at later dates. Yet it still seems necessary to spend some time browsing for new sources.
The large number of art magazines are a case in point (Aestheitca seems familiar from gallery shops). I’m never quite sure with art periodicals whether to read yet another piece by the likes of Grayson Perry (in case he says something not about growing up in Essex etc.) or work my way through the mountain of unknown writers. The trouble is that if I’m ruthless and honest, most magazine content has tangential interest to me. Buying single articles online could be the way forward. Then again, this lacks the feel of a magazine, whatever that is.
On academic content to essays – there is arguably a whole genre of article and blog post in which a subject is discussed and then in the last paragraph we are told how ‘this kind of mechanical reproduction was discussed in a paper by Walter Benjamin …’ Are they telling me something useful about their references or are they just telling me they’ve read them? Maybe it’s what happens when arts and humanities courses train us in relating (usually the same) theorists to contemporary culture? A case of old habits dying hard?
There are a few products coming out now that refactor links from twitter and facebook “friendfeeds” (I’m not quite sure of the terminology) and turns them into magazine-like collections. One example is http://www.flipboard.com/ – a hipstery iPad app that makes reading your friends links somehow more like browsing a magazine.
But, of course, all those links are going to be things that are hot on the internet now. On of the great things about living with my parents is the weekend ritual of reading several papers, wading through the massive weekend sections to find something interesting. Just being exposed to a wider range of stuff is interesting, and if you only brought things an article at a time – or only browsed the one section of a newspapers website – you’d miss out on a whole bunch of stuff.
While replying to your comment I feel a sudden sense of guilt about my email inbox… Hmmm…