Can I Touch That?

Sep 19

Before there were Kindles glowing like night-lights and celebrities whisper-reading you to sleep, there were bedtime stories. Actual pages. Actual ink. Every night, someone (Mom, Dad, whoever lost the coin toss) would read to me, flipping thick, colorful pages like they were auditioning for Broadway.

“What do you see?” they’d ask. And my tiny hands would slap the page like I was solving a mystery. Thinking, absorbing, memorizing. Babbling words that only parental bias could call coherent. Night after night, I was hooked.

It wasn’t just the stories. It was the weight of a book in my lap. The way the pages caught the lamplight. That papery crackle when you turned too fast. My first clue that media wasn’t only about what you consumed, but what you could bend, scribble on, and claim as yours.

Then came the fifteen minutes of solo reading before bed, pilgrimages to Barnes & Noble for something with oomph, and eventually the golden years of magazines. MTV on blast in the background. A bedazzled Sidekick rotting at the bottom of my backpack. A Nylon spread suctioned to my face. Perfume samples choking the air. Me, circling outfits in Sharpie, staining my fingers, underlining bands that immediately landed on my Myspace playlist.

It’s always been about print for me. Something you can rip out, tape up, tear down. Shelves in my childhood bedroom are still holding the weight of hundreds of torn up magazines, zines from artist shows, photo books, etc. But every year, another magazine keels over. Just recently, Vogue announced the monthly issue is no more. Not shocking, fine, but still, ouch. And it’s not just magazines. Menus turned into QR codes. Albums into playlists. Photo albums into clouds. Everything once meant to be touched has been flattened into the cold rectangle of a screen.

A magazine used to be sacred. You sat with it, dog-eared its pages, let the images and headlines linger. Fonts adjusted to the millimeter so they sat on the page like they had always belonged. Pull quotes slashed across spreads with precision. White space was never empty, it breathed. Even the finish mattered, the soft drag of matte, the slippery glare of gloss. Now everything feels thinner, a dimension shaved away.

I love the internet. It pretty much raised me. It has given me more music, writing, rabbit holes, and funny videos than I could ever count. But it came at a cost. Print is expensive. Attention spans are cooked.

And I guess what I keep circling is this. What happens to us, to our world, to our creativity, to art, to culture, as print slowly disappears? What shifts in the way we create and consume when everything lives behind glass instead of in our hands?

Scrolling doesn’t leave a trace. The feed refreshes, your brain blanks, your phone smacks you in the face. Nothing lingers. In print, though, there’s that low-voltage thrill. You run your fingers across a page, fold it, carry it until the corners curl. Spines crack. Ink rubs off. You remember the weight of flipping through an artist’s retrospective, the glossy foldouts that stretched across your desk, the way certain images felt too good to keep contained in a single issue. It’s not something you skimmed half-asleep in the morning and forgot about by lunch. You were there.

Sometimes I catch myself mid-scroll, thumb twitching, and I reach for something else instead. A book. A zine. Even a crumpled receipt with half a grocery list. Anything that reminds me that media isn’t just consumed, it’s held.

The internet endlessly refreshes. A page stays still. Screens are for forgetting. Pages are for keeping.