For a period of time, my mother would tell me off every single time for buying a magazine. She would complain about the stacks I would collect over time, succumbing to dust and its imminent demise.
I didn’t care because I enjoyed whipping out a glossy, in between working on assignments or taking care of errands, and flipping through the smooth pages, the smell of fresh printer ink, and the bright vivid colors popping off the pages.
I don’t think my mother completely realized my motives for purchasing hard copies of my favorite publications, because she’d simply tell me, “These magazines come in online versions nowadays. Why waste money, when you’ll eventually toss them out after you’re done?”
She has a point. But that still wasn’t a good enough excuse to stop buying these magazines. Technology may be designed to make our lives easier, it optimizes efficiency, and most things are at our beck and call at the click of a button, or two. What technology cannot replace is the evocation of nostalgia, a reliable comfort mechanism, and the integration of more than one of the five senses.
Living in an increasingly fast-paced world, there are some things that simply need to resist obsoleteness for the sake of reminding us that we are still capable of living without the crutch of gadgets and gizmos.
So get me those glossy magazines, please.
(Noora Faraj, Senior Producer of Web TV at Al Arabiya English, can be reached at: noora.faraj@mbc.net)
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