The Last Page

Sometime soon, the forty-nine years of Dissent will be available online—every article in every issue. Right now, we post a number of key articles on our Web site as soon as the “real” issue—paper, ink, and glue—appears; and after a few weeks, we post more articles; and a few weeks later, more again. Someone who lives on the Internet doesn’t need the actual magazine. And lots of people live on the Internet; the number is growing steadily. Soon we will have ask ourselves whether there is any point to the paper, ink, and glue.

I am a lover of magazines. A fairly indiscriminate lover: flimsy weeklies, glossy monthlies, heavy (but pugnacious) quarterlies—I love them all. I am less fond of academic journals, but the closer they come to magazines, the more ready they are to print letters, invite arguments and counter-arguments, risk topicality, the easier it is for me to make my peace with them. It’s not just the content that warms my heart; maybe it’s not the content at all. In fact, there are many magazines that I hate reading; I disagree fiercely with the articles they print; I wish their editors, as Irving Howe once said, many years of political failure. But I love the form of a magazine, the platonic idea of a magazine: that it is written for the moment; that it speaks to today’s urgencies; that you can carry it around; and that you can, in anger, throw it across the room.

But sometime soon Dissent will be available on my Palm Pilot (of course I don’t have a Palm Pilot, but sometime soon I might have one), and I will be able to carry the Palm Pilot around and even throw it across the room. So, again, what is the point of the actual magazine, the material object, the paper, ink, and glue? Why not a virtual Dissent, floating in cyberspace? It would be much cheaper—no printing costs, no mailing costs. It wouldn’t take up space on my bookshelf. Sometime soon I won’t need a bookshelf.

There already are virtual magazines, and they possess the virtues of a magazine to the nth degree: they are far more responsive than any printed magazine can possibly be to the urgencies of the moment. They respond, one might say, to the urgencies of the second. They are infinitely updatable. Reading them is a breathless and, potentially, an endless experience. Why do I, as a lover of magazines, find
the experience so unsatisfying?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original meaning of the word “virtual” (which comes to us from the Latin, via late Middle English) is “possessed of certain physical virtues.” Well, there’s the problem: virtual magazines have no physical virtues. Reading them, I feel dispossessed. And I realize now that this isn’t only because I can’t hold the real thing and turn the actual pages. It is also because I value this finite object, where writers have committed themse...