When I was younger, wide-eyed and curious, I would flip through the glossy pages of magazines like Rolling Stone and National Geographic, and dream that one day my words would appear behind their covers. I loved the physical, tangible aspects of print media, all the flipping, pausing, turning, dog-earing. With something new and exciting to explore on the next page, there was always so much satisfaction with every flip.
Now that print media is essentially dying in this Digital Age we are caught in, is that same satisfaction lost? Can a reader be just as influenced by an article plastered on a screen? At a time when Twitter is considered a reliable news source and anything of significance can be relayed through an emoji, does the death of print also mean the death of writing?
Let us hope not. The swiping of a screen and the clicking of links has now replaced the joy in flipping a page and ogling at the words etched upon it, but has the content changed and become less mesmerizing?
Of course not, because writing is not the page-to-page motions, it is the actual content. An audience can still be reached through a screen. The little Allis of the world can still be touched and moved by words. The only difference is those words can be accessed with the touch of a button and those pages can be thumbed through with the swipe of a finger.
The Digital Age may have killed print, but it most certainly hasn’t done away with writing. If anything, written content is more accessible, easier to navigate and more widely explored. For instance, a lot of magazines, such as National Geographic and Rolling Stone, can now be read through a digital format on their websites. Today, words are bolder, voices are louder and opinions are stronger than ever. That is something you can’t get between the pages of a magazine. Life.
