It’s a Sunday afternoon and we’ve got The Sunday Telegraph and The Sunday Times on the go in the living room, the floor is a patchwork of around 25 different papers and supplements (some are possibly from yesterday’s Times), many of these papers have accumulated next to me as I slowly plough my way through them with great delight.
My dad had made his way through the particular supplement he was reading and asked me to pass him The Telegraph’s Seven section, I recommended he reads The Times Culture section, which is my opinion a better entertainment supplement, and passed him both. As you can see by the delight drawn across his face above he agrees with my recommendation!
My interest in this exchange is the mutual experience we are having of the media in which we invested. The 25 or so supplements, which are now also being passed around to my sister and have even interrupted my mum’s eBay addiction, are all part of an incredibly flexible product.
The act of sharing the content isn’t at all complicated. Only one person can be reading a unique part of the product at one time, recommendations can be made by us individually based on our knowledge of the others unique interests. We can see the products and move them around our physical space, picking them up and passing them from hand-to-hand when necessary or waiting for them to be finished with before we read them.
I passed my sister a particularly good picture feature in today’s Times Magazine, which I knew she would be interested in, and my dad as I write this has just plonked an article from last week’s Observer (which is still kicking around) in front of me about the first 10 years of Tate Modern, because he knows I love the gallery. I’ll read it when I’ve finished this.
We discuss articles as we read. Dad has just found out that “Valerie Singleton lives in Somerset” a fact contextually relevant to our location. Due to the nature of the medium we’re all engaged in a valuable shared experience of the content in which we’ve invested. This experience would seem to me infinitely more difficult to recreate in a digital form.
What happens when papers are no longer printed and we all have an iPad on which we read our Sunday papers? The experience of the media may be regressive; the tablet we are viewing media on would be one of stone, which needs to be passed from caveman to caveman in its entirety.
The iPad and similar devices are going to be extremely exciting mediums to work with and I look forward to the changes that will happen to the media products we make and consume. We must however recognise that as well as building new products those in existence now have some very uniquely engaging properties by the virtue of their physicality, which we should be extremely careful not to overlook and devalue in the development of the new products.
On a bank holiday weekend I cherish the experience of Sunday papers, if only I didn’t have this bloody ink all over my hands!