Mike Turro | My Amplify

Khoi Vinn is absolutely right–about the obvious, most agreed upon points of failure in the current crop of iPad magazines. You can't share from them (though from some you can), they are lacking integrated subscription models (though some are not), and they are bloated and take too long to download (though some are light and download fairly quickly). He is also spot on with regard to the way Adobe and other software vendors prey on publishers and sell them on the notion that difficult change is nothing more than a bad dream–but that's another post entirely.

Khoi's mistake (I call it beautiful because it seems logical and there is no hard evidence that it is in fact a mistake) is his apparent assumption that the magazine form–collected articles, enveloped by an informed editorial vision, and bound by issue–is something of a one medium pony. While that model was indeed birthed by the technology of the press and it's pace dictated by the ebb and flow of the post it's not at all clear that print is the only environment it can live in. It may be that the networked, digital, real time world–a world built and maintained by an exponentially increasing degree of choice–actually demands a slower, focused, slightly out of time, "print-centric" option as a balance.

The fact of the matter is that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in, that is making less and less sense as we forge further into this century, and that makes almost no sense on a tablet. As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all — a problem that’s abetted and exacerbated by the full-screen, single-window posture of all iPad software. In a media world that looks increasingly like the busy downtown heart of a city — with innumerable activities, events and alternative sources of distraction around you — these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac.

I find it peculiar that in the sped up, distracted, busy downtown heart of the city that is our media environment Khoi's prescription for success is to give the inundated reader more of the same. If we accept that the broad mission of the publisher is to enlighten and inform the reader is it not incumbent upon that publisher to try and penetrate this (social) media noise with something approximating a signal? Shouldn't the smart publisher be the proprietor of the quiet and coherent cafe around the corner? Shouldn't the aim of the magazine in the digital world be to pull passersby out of the bright lights of Naked Cowboy Times Square and into a quiet space where ideas can be presented for consideration in a focused and structured way? Just like slow food, shouldn't there be a place for slow media?

Undoubtedly there will be those who read these words and say "Yes. There is a place for slow media–print." Khoi himself indicates this in the mention of his paid and seemingly satisfying subscription to the printed New Yorker. While I agree that print is indeed a wonderful and slow medium that quite effectively provides the sort of experience I describe above it is also a very expensive and elitist medium. While digital technologies like magcloud have made print a bit more accessible, it is still no match for digital media as an egalitarian platform for independent and fringe voices. Beyond that it is a near certainty that many of the titles currently using the technology of ink on paper will not be able to sustain that for too much longer.  Exactly when the cost of manufacturing print will exceed the value it brings to readers is anybody's guess, but any medium that relies so heavily on cheap and available natural resources such as oil and pulp is volatile to say the least.

Without a doubt the future of magazines–both as an industry and a publishing framework–is uncertain. However, to write off the reading experience provided by a good magazine as a relic of the print world is extremely shortsighted. When Khoi offhandedly and anecdotally declares "that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in" he is assuming (though he does give a slight nod to the contrary) that the current use patterns of the web's most emphatic users (also iPad's early adopters) are an indication of the eventual use patterns of the population of tablet users as a whole. Khoi is certainly a smart guy, but it may be a bit early to make that call.

If the success of the iPad says anything it's that the rush to diffused, unbound, atomized content pieces may have been a bit of a bubble itself. Even Flipboard–the app that Khoi himself singles out as "more of a window to the world at large" can be seen as a reaction to the ethereal, unbound, drifting, unfocused, overwhelming content cloud. That Flipboard takes the magazine as its prime metaphor is quite telling–even if they have stripped the form of its most compelling (perhaps even defining) components. The solution that Flipboard provides is the same as your traditional magazine–coherence. It's prime directive is to create meaning from a vast ocean of data–with an algorithm. Neat trick for sure, but the meaning it's creating is farcically specific, tragically ephemeral, and ultimately useless. In trying to focus the deluge of data for me it neither empowers me with the filtering skills I'll need if/when I need to deal directly with the raw data nor challenges me with the intellectual perspective inherent in the traditional editorial model.

While tools like Flipboard are compelling to a certain extent, the fact that these types of tools are engineered in a web first way gives me pause. In the Flipboard world the human is simply a datapoint–another binary instance in the technology's evolving web of complexity and choice. Everyday more of these instances, more perspectives, more images, more sounds, more words stumble into the web and enter the pool of potential interactions. This pool is deep and wide and a whole lot of fun to dive into. We can easily drift into anywhere or anyone at anytime. It is indeed a serendipity engine. Yet when confronted with so much fluid data it's important that we also have the choice to opt out–to slow down lest we float aimlessly away link by link. If we engineer ourselves beyond that point–if we only build systems and tools that respond to the web's need for us to lust after information and connection, and we neglect the time honored tools of slow reflection, we run the risk of slipping from users to used.