antipopper

For me, at least, the editorialisation of pop culture has evaporated, almost without trace. This is interesting, given that throughout the 1990s I regarded magazines like The Face as a constant touchstone — a fairly mainstream but nonetheless interesting barometer of where things were at. And yes, even stuff like Wired. (Am I the only one who finds the critique of its techno-capitalist triumphalism a bit, uh, obvious? It was such an easy target. But then again, I’m the kinda communist that’s read Fast Company since the Dot Com days, and has always been disdainful of Adbusters.) Hell, I worked for a major national music magazine, in the day. I collected pop culture magazines: an entire bookshelf in my loungeroom is stacked with blocks of their matching spines. Now those institutions are either gone, or largely irrelevant. I don’t read new magazines that deal with popular culture. I now get my zeitgeist from various ephemeral networks, like blogs, or forums, or actually swapping cultural material with people in physical space when we happen to be working in the same office on the same day. I don’t even really watch TV anymore — it’s all torrented. All very symptomatic of networked culture, blah blah.

But here’s the rub: I don’t have the energy to keep this up all the time — ferreting out of these little nuggets of culture out of an endless web. (And if you think it’s going to be solved with online reputation systems, you’ve got to be joking.) And you know, I really miss The Face. Those things no longer seem to count in any collective sense of “readership” or “audience”, but I miss their voice. Am I a reactionary nostalgist? It’s not so much its mediating function, or its centralisation, but its consistency and concentration.

[ tags: magazines, pop, pop-culture, public, public-sphere ]