Authorised.  

This is not a transcript of the podcast of Monocle 24’s podcast, The Stack, but a light reflect of what I had thought afterwards, occured in the light intricacies of my mind, while listening to the exchange between Tyler Brulê and Lucia Van Der Post on the 30th January 2016 (link attached). My interest in the publication is purely on a per-interest basis, and I find that it is refreshing to see fashion intersected with tech and coffee, in the podcasts that the different Editors touch on - that actually made me write several posts on a status update, and decided to pare down the words, into this post instead.

This happens on an echoing of that post, this morning: (Lifted from my Facebook post)

Morning rituals. Coffee, paper, searching on tablet (apparently an iPad Air) - I realise how I’ve spanned the media timeline.

From reading a real Financial Times (orange headlines are addicting!) and local post (of the country I’m in), and a glossy magazine of choice (usually Vogue), I realise the merits of being digital in the now: search, faster response to queries, confirmations, and a greener way to publish articles , monitor views, and make faster edits. In the publishing business, the faster you churn, the faster the turnover of pay. Digital makes for better energy management all around - but adoption is harder for the ones whose voices actually (ironically) matters most. We help this along with helping them with the transport of their words - their being able to write and getting their thoughts on paper. Sort of like a seance, or a quick conduit that will frictionlessly convey these edicts. Like electricity that’s being passed in cables, or light in led / optic fibres that reflect it seamlessly, it should be unhindered and unfiltered in a slight of slant that might be hurtful or skewed to a political mantra or will. This white paper, albeit scientific, objectivity is best unmarred by vile conductors of social heat/ energy/ electricity that would be best left alone, until prepared for audience-ready (are they the sort for candid, humorous and candour?) type of ventures.

I learnt more from this podcast than from walking in the streets checking people out, or meeting people for conversation in cafés, otherwise I’d be rather alone writing in my co-work mode with a mobile phone, a laptop, or a gaff until the next planned event (that I will probable give a miss because of my odd circadian outer planetary settings unsynced). Just about the commentary on adverts versus editorial strike me as a funny bit of reprisal of products-as-media and the advertising money has gone into the applications, and the YouTube media values measured in-house, priced and now loads of other platforms that offer a site-seeing for a peer-price. Advertising money has now transformed media landscape to be cranially challenging, for “thinking out of the proverbial box”. Bloggers who aren’t paid but give proper commentary - the media pass actually affords you free entry to parties and press events, with sometimes food and drinks, plus swag, but avoid the “please write something pleasant and don’t ruin our years-old business reputation” conversation at all costs. This is a hard grasp at what value the media and press actually hold, which is a rather steady wield over corporates or people, who actually have something against the public, but want to look right. It is actually a steady trail if done right, and will hold “real guardianship” instead of “publicity in the pocket”.

We are in an era where having a say is a privilege, and a right, at the same time. And with mobile devices, this is easily done. Will it devalue proper Editors’ say and rather turn to crowdfunded/free press rather than advert press - for the truth? Or for a very solid opinion on things, product, life, and ways and means? I wouldn’t discount views, but would recount a weighted slant to those I find are sound, and whether that comes of age or experience, it also comes with heft, and will go once around without prejudice, and the ultimate need for the faff.

#glucoseforgobs (note: I don’t know why I add hashtags to this obviously un-indexable front-end page of my private FB feed).

A real understanding of what Editors’ ethos are in today’s digital fast-paced life, and when we say this - is not only the publishers push that make the Editors ready for the publish-happy, digital front-end mailer or advertising copywriters, but so are the authors and contributory, literary, anthology or novel-writers, that it’s become a machinery that has lost its natural organic cadence of consumption. As media becomes a hungrier monster, there is an increasing demand for coverage of events, articles, things to read, compounded to speed and subjected to self-edits; and instead of qualifying what we read (as classically found in card catalogued libraries, meandering in bookstores - and those magazine stalls like the local 007 newsagents in Singapore called the Mama shoppes), and even with shopping for books in Amazon’s long list of titles, I think we are brought along in digital ways to cope with the breadth and depth of that growing index, which is the only way we know today on how to cope with the persistent growth to scale, in the amount of information brought to us at an instant.

The summer’s reading list it has dawned on me presents a huge load of musts - like being a part of a knitting circle that challenges you to their group goals of 20 sacs/ bags per month - or something that your reading group raises you to read 200 books completely end-to-end in a year. (Can this be done, is this unheard of, would this mean missing out on events, people’s birthday bashes and even meals at one go, would this go towards a discussion or any sort of merit apart from the real merit of reading for pleasure?) Are all these various thoughts that would enter quite naturally in someone trying to embark in something that digital actually presses upon us. Speed versus depth. Both accommodate the welcome of fast paced tech platforms and handy back end sub-html (like Markdown coding for Writers), and appreciatingly we are enabled to navigate, and elegantly put simple words on a page.

The thought of “We made tech to enable the speed of on-boarding, without understanding the real pleasure of the browse. is a bother to post-modern consumption of media, where the printed page is treasured with a languid old world consumption to a modern world creation, because of being attuned to the demand side of publishing. In consuming, the real pleasure is taken with being surprised by what you find, rather than the premeditated plans of needing to read, being indexed, topping a search list, or to say it’s been done, premises you are pleasured by measurement of accomplishment according to perhaps another group’s consumer stick.

I just know that I challenge myself to seek this everyday. Creatively understanding or being verbatim with living by (or against) someone’s words that we find would terribly crush the innate ignorance in all of us, that i feel might be the real monster perhaps. With a real turn of the heel, we get that someone needs to turn the wheels of business, for someone to turn the wheels of thought, and this machinery has been going on in all kinds of companies. The machinery of advertising and the machinery of editorial - is like the dragon chasing its own tail - to all the various entrants and evolves of the real publishing that has transgressed, and now premiere in the dot com publishing - is not about words to products, or websites as products, or websites as catalogs to real-life products, which are just as invariably factored in as the landscape that we are mired in real-time today, not just within the traditional three months later of publishing houses. It serves the now, the witnessing of the change that has happened, instead of predictors of what is to be a very languid, patient, ongoing, loyal audience. The on-trend efforts of what is current, (if time is measured in bits would be a byte of a millisecond of a graze of that exact event in that moment), now considered to have more value over what transpired last Christmas that was expected to show within the following season, and next quarter - and this is, you know, no longer quite the currency today.

Which I think makes all media consumers (and producers) valid, happy, and for everyone else concerned, well-engaged.