Zombie (Media) Hunter

On New Old Media.

Sure, okay this is two days late -- practically ancient and totally sacrilege here on the world of the internet -- but occasionally I have deadlines in meatspace and skip these things over. Only I've been thinking about this one for a few hours (when I should be writing an introduction to my work that I'm giving in for assessment on the 1st.)

Distraction over.

The aforementioned top link, Scoble giving props to the (his?) 'Blogger and Podcaster' magazine, stuck me as odd. Okay, well not the actual link or post, but the phrase: I like this online format for displaying magazine contents.

Newsflash: Nobody Likes Magazine Formats.

Dead Tree Media gone Zombie Media.
I like how you combine two obsolete pieces of technology!

Seriously, for a minute homeslices, I thought it was some sort of post-post-modern joke --- hey internet people, who's virtual interactive landscape has rendered paper-print media obsolete, look at this flat object who's most cutting edge aspect is the talking advertisements!!! --- then I realised as Scoble lacks a sense of humour, that could not be the case.

Don't get me wrong ese, I grew up with magazines telling me all sorts of wonderful things -- National Geographic and i-D, weird hippie shit and American Girl -- a whole plethora of printed information.

Then I got the Internet when I was like 9, an that shit didn't matter any more. Here was a platform that gave me websites where I could flick back and forth between information as quickly and as deeply as I wanted to, never having to get caught up in 'flat' text as it were. Magazines slowly became a supplement. As time went by, and the range of information on the web became wider and wider, magazines became more and more as a sort of casual 'take a glance, find online' form of information dispersal.

The last magazine I bought was National Geographic in December of 2006 -- I bought it because it had something cool on Saturn (omg! its online? NO WAI!) and I was travelling from London to Paris for Xmas, and wanted to give my kid sisters the huge poster of the planets. It hangs in the pantry over the fish now, and it blew their minds, the consideration that Jupiter and Saturn are so fucking huge and that Pluto and Eris are such odd little dwarf planets -- we discussed definition of celestial objects and it was awesome. Thank you, printed media - because that is one thing you can do that my little 15" MacBook can't do -- challenge my spacial perceptions through different formatting of sizes, then get hung up on the wall to remind me all the time.

Or, can you?

This brings me around. While things like Scoble's abso-fucking-lutely absurd revamp of magazines for the web make me kinda wanna cry a little bit (so redundant, so unæsthetic...), things like Nikon's Universcale on the whole other hand, gives a very fine example of better (or maybe just a fresher, more interesting?) ways of displaying information.

This Easter when I was sitting with my sisters in France again, we were looking at the Universcale together and talking, again, about spatial relationships. We were totally digging how it, that is the flash presentation (artfully done!), didn't seem to need us at all in order to go through it's cycle of information dispersal, but at the same time when we did show up to pay attention, we could skip to and fro without any problems or difficulty.

Which to me illustrates a fine example as what we are as human beings in this vast, sprawling universe: tiny, irrelevant specks -- until we take action.

Tags: zombie media, ghost on the stage, how big are you?, I'm an authority on authorities, blogger and podcaster, magazies are dead old man, too many chefs, not enough artists