A Confession of the Digital Age
I still have a subscription to the New Yorker

There is something mentally taxing about surfing the Internet. In the last hour I have probably read at ten or fifteen articles, even though I just logged on to check the headlines and my Facebook page before bed. I have consumed a lot of information—a indulged lot of content, but I still feel a foreboding sense of emptiness. I will still crawl into my bed and feel compelled to read a magazine or a novel before I go to sleep.

Maybe I am just of the old school. I’m only 24, but still I do feel like at the end of the Net generation. I can, for example, remember a time when the Internet was a foreign concept. I remember the first website I visited—it was MuchMusic.com. I was like 12.

Don’t get me wrong, now 12 years later I am now fully immersed. I haven’t read a real daily newspaper in years. On the rare occasion that I buy a CD—at a concert for example—I will immediately burn it to my computer, forgetting that the physical copy ever exited. But there are certain things that still perplex me.

With newspapers, the shift was easy. You read a newspaper the same way you read online—spastically, sporadically. You rarely ever get fully immersed. Articles on adjacent pages constantly draw your eye the same way links and scroll bars do. But magazines are different. I don’t really know why, but they are.

Slate Magazine’s Culture Gabfest—a weekly podcast panel discussion from Slate.com—had a discussion last week about the future of the magazine. Being that Slate is itself an online magazine, the conclusions were obvious: the magazine—which is essentially a collection of interesting articles, opinions, photos, ect—is and will survive the digital age. You know the argument—the Internet will get better with more bandwidth and so too will Internet magazines at using that bandwidth. Being someone who sees the future headed in precisely this direction, I couldn’t help but agree with Slate. I’m an optimist. But there is just one thing that still gets me: it feels different.

There is a lot of talk about shortening attention spans and the Internet shrinking our brains and all that, but for the most part I find it hard to believe. At the very least, I can admit that our brains are evolving—that our minds our adapting to new and different ways of receiving and analyzing art, culture, and the like. And maybe that is just it. Maybe long form journalism will not survive and my one-day career as a magazine writer is fucked. Maybe our brains are evolving away from the kind of writing that I have spent the better part of my adult life to imitate.

I guess this is both a confession and plea. Despite being a man of the future, who gets most of his information online, I like to read the New Yorker offline. That’s the confession. The plea is this: please someone figure it out soon; please, Internet save me!!!!