Posted on by Mediaatsydney

Slow Magazines: Indies in print in a digital age

Friday May 18, 3.00pm – 4.30pm

S226 Seminar Room, Department of Media and Communications, John Woolley Building, (Level 2 entry off Manning Road), University of Sydney

Imagine walking into WH Smiths or Barnes and Noble where mainstream print magazines are placed under accepted industry categories, and where sales are generally in decline. Now imagine an alternative magazine store where categories are challenged, subverted and invented, and where new titles proliferate and have a growing audience. These stores exist in the ‘creative cities’ of the West and are a vital element for the indie magazine community of makers and readers to thrive.

Slow Magazines: Indies in print in a digital age investigates the reasons behind the surprising proliferation of indie magazines in print being made in the digital 21st century, a time when print was expected to become obsolete.

These magazines are a critical and creative response to the speed and distractions of digital media. And yet, while slow magazines are produced as beautiful printed objects, they use the affordances of digital culture (software, websites, social media) to create a breathing space of quality independent journalism, editorial and design creativity, with the aim of providing alternative representations of the ways we live, think and create.

Insights gained from interviews with a broad range of indie makers in the UK, Europe, US and Australia will be integrated within a discussion of the philosophy of ‘slow’, the democratisation of critique, neoliberalism and the DIY/DIWO/DWYL nexus, the discourse and analysis of creative labour, the connection between independent media and the Utopian question ‘what if?’, in an attempt to explain this phenomenon.

Megan Le Masurier is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. She has been collecting print indie magazines for more than a decade and is working on a book to explain her, and others, obsession – Slow Magazines: Indies in print in a digital age.