I sat through a debate on Tuesday night that was more interesting for its audience and positioning than it was for its addressing of the motion — ‘the internet needs magazines more than magazines need the internet.’
The debate was held at the London College of Fashion just off Regent Street, and was organised by the British Society of Magazine Editors and editorialdesign.org. The audience was evidently a non-technical one, keen on understanding how the whole magazine/internet crossover thing might work. My colleague, a designer, later commented that the room was full of fear, fear that everyone’s hard won Quark or InDesign layout skills would prove insufficient for the brave new technological world. And rightly so.
The panel was made up of a variety of figures from the print world, some of whom had made forays into the web. It became obvious that we were in a decidedly nontechnical audience for whom the internet was an unknown quantity and whose main concern was replicating the magazine experience in web form.
Straight talking David Hepworth, the esteemed editor of The Word magazine and co-founder of such titles as Mixmag, Smash Hits, and The Face, nailed the argument with the night’s opening statement. Do not attempt to reproduce the magazine experience in web form. The printed word is glossy, definitive and final. The web is none of these things. To work on the web, said Hepworth, your offering must have humility, economy and personality. At least two of those things can be said to be absent from the UK’s magazine culture, with the third possibly endangered in the vast majority of the output.
Then at one point the discussion descended into one of gender politics stemming from the unfortunately all male panel.
The most glaring misjudgment, however, was uttered by Paul Kurzeja — creative director at Redwood, the world’s biggest customer publishing agency. Declaring the future to be one of technological revolution and infinitely diverse media, Kurzeja invoked that most misguided of delusions — YOU WILL HAVE THE INTERNET ON YOUR FRIDGE.
Why does this crazed obsession with the assumed permeation of technology into every area of our lives persist? I suggest it’s more an allusion to the quotidian nature of the fridge, the kitchen and its intrinsic presence in our life. It also assumes that we all have a huge, family-sized tank of a fridge, big enough to fit a screen on as well as an ice-crusher, smoothie-maker and little Rupert’s simply darling hamfisted scribbles supposedly meant to be Mummy and Daddy. But, really, I think the ‘empty bottle of milk’ is a perfectly adequate graphical model for the average consumer to reference when considering whether or not to buy more cow juice. Don’t you?
