During my lifetime, magazines went from a waiting room stable, an airplane must-have, and a beloved piece of mail in my mailbox to nearly entirely obsolete. Culturally, not much is different. People are still interested in reading the news, tabloids or other specialized publications. What has changed is the habit of how they get this information. The format in which they read has evolved to the digital. Why would someone pay for a magazine when they could read the exact same article on the internet for free? Undeniably, users prefer convenience above all else when engaging with media. This trend exists outside of magazines. Video streaming replaced DVD, music streaming replaced CD, and even online shopping has replaced the need to shop in person. The user is given convenience of time, of access, of space, of cost, and of selection. “You can just do it online” has become a defining statement of our current era of user experience. Yet, are these experiences the same? The product may be the same – for magazines, this means getting the same information – but digital surrogates do not fully emulate the embodied experience of physical engagement. Furthermore, when something is unavailable digitally, suddenly the convenience evaporates. Emma Stanford evaluates the user experience with digital surrogates in her chapter “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates.” Where digitization is a great way to enable multi-platform conveniences, it also necessitates altering the source material. Digital surrogacy is a fundamentally different user experience, and magazines are a model of these differences.
“The hallmark of a bad digital surrogate is that its badness cannot be gauged, because important contextual details are missing. Put another way, there are no bad digital surrogates—only misleading and poorly described ones.”
A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates p210. Emma Stanford.
Emma Stanford argues that digital surrogates are neither perfect substitutes nor are they threats to originals. To tie back to my own previous blog post, digital surrogates do not replace the experience of engaging with works in person. They are not inherently bad nor inherently good. Digitized works exist in their own category as approximations. Their value is in their ability to reproduce and disseminate works, but in turn, they freeze a work into one specific viewing model. This is where digital archivists have to be the most mindful. They want to be sure that they are using best practices and good equipment when digitizing works. Digital archivists have to use very specialized equipment and the work can be quite time consuming. This step is critical and is the invisible labor behind all digital surrogates. What is chosen for digitization depends heavily on the resources and interest of the archivists. That which is given the most attention is most likely to be digitized (and digitized well). There are all kinds of works that are not digitized, and to illustrate the difference between the physical and the digital, I want to make an example out of a personal collection of mine.
I am deeply interested in keeping up with celebrity news. One of my favorite sources for this information is the magazine People. Physical issues have been available since 1974, and now the magazine can be accessed through their website and on social media platforms. Articles and issues published after about 2008 are fairly easy to access through their in-site navigation. The website even offers some web-exclusive articles such as the People StyleWatch section. The online platform also allows for functionality that would otherwise be unavailable in the print format. To name a few, users can click links to products and go directly to its shopping page, they can leave comments on articles, and they can search through tags to read more on news that interests them. All of these conveniences have made it so the digital format has surpassed the physical in popularity. Yet, on the other side, the physical issue has noticeable differences.
Below are two photo scans from the cover article of People vol. 36, no. 7, Patrick Swayze’s Sexiest Man Alive issue from August 26 1991 (rotated for readability). These are digitizations I made using my personal physical copy of the issue.
And below is a screenshot of the digital surrogate of the same article.
The differences should be immediately apparent. In the printed article, the text is formatted around the photos, there are bold letters and block quotes, and the issue was printed in a rotated vertical format. The emphasis in the web version is on the content of the text, and even still, it does not include all of the text. This web digital surrogate – to use Stanford’s reasoning – is bad. It lacks a great deal of contextual information that the print version had. Yet, this is the only version available online as there are – in my search – no photo scans of the issue online. Complicatedly, I was only able to find the digital article on the Wayback Machine – itself a digital surrogate of the internet and not an exact approximation of viewing the article at the time it was published online. It seems the article has been archived from the site and is inaccessible using the site’s navigation bar. Stanford points out that even when works are made digitally accessible, they may not stay accessible forever thereby making the digitization efforts disappear.
So, with all these problems, what is the point of digitization of older magazines at all?
“…while digital surrogates may not be perfect, they are better than nothing, and the need for them is urgent.”
A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates p208. Emma Stanford.
In my perspective, reading this specific issue in person was the only complete option. Even my digitization is itself a digital surrogate, and I used it in this post to serve as a stand in for the actual object. By rotating the pages, I modified the images in a way that alters your viewing experience. The magazine is also more than just the one article. I found the other articles, the vintage advertisements, and the tactile experiences all shaped how I engaged with this piece of media. I love collecting physical media, but of course this is not always an option for everyone. And while the demand for this issue might not be high, I think it would be a good idea for me to photo scan the rest of the pages and upload them. Now, if only I could figure out if that is legal under copyright… that is a thought for another day.
