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05.19.2010

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From Print to iPad

Time Magazine's back cover makes us pause

There is a general cultural tendency to want to view the present as dramatically different from the past—especially when speaking to people one or two generations younger than ourselves. In truth, there are often far more similarities than differences when one looks at macro-level cultural features across a 20 or 30 year time span.

Considering the span 1980 to 2010, the world is surprisingly the same. Geopolitical instability in the Middle East, we still have 50 states, we’re still tinkering around with pre-moon space travel, we still drive to work every day in cars and we still fill our houses with dogs and cats. Sadly, we still haven’t nailed down the hover car or jet packs that we’ve been dreaming about for more than a century.

Of course, none of that keeps us from playing armchair quarterback with great ease as we speak to our friends and loved ones about what life used to be like, where we are today and where we are headed.

This leads to that awkward feeling of equal parts nostalgia, emotion and frustration when someone older than us utters the timeless phrase, “You have to understand, it was a different time back then.”

In other words, our discussions of past, present and future are highly stylized narratives not that dissimilar from other everyday social interactions— greetings, goodbyes, water cooler chats, calls to mom, etc.

These are social devices we create that allow us to keep moving forward without having to consistently grapple with perplexing — often unanswerable — questions about what is really happening in the world around us.

So when events do unfold that begin to defy such easy characterization, we are often left with a profound feeling of existential confusion which often expresses itself as silence as we struggle to find meaning in what it is we have encountered.

This, we submit, is one of those moments.

The May 3, 2010 issue of Time has that noticeable non-magazine feel characteristic of many print publications struggling to stay afloat these days. After grabbing an issue in the airport recently, we found ourselves instinctively wanting to put it back in the bin because it didn’t feel like a magazine. It seemed more like an insert that had fallen out of a magazine than a magazine itself.

And after reading this issue of Time — printed on old-fashioned paper — we flopped it down on the table, revealing its back cover.

There we encountered an image, full page, with but a single word on the upper right corner: “iPad”. And upon closer inspection, we realized that the gentleman was using the iPad to read, well, The New York Times.

Contrary to our typical style, we offer no comment or insight here as we, and likely the rest of us, struggle to grasp the full significance of this moment and the implications for the future — whatever they may be.

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