This morning I downloaded the brand new Guardian iPhone app. It made me think anew about one of my favourite subjects, how we read. Before I start telling you what I think I just wanted to make one thing totally clear. Although part of the week I work in The Guardian, only a very short walk away from Jonathon Moore, the product manager for the app, I hadn’t actually played with the app until this morning. Sure I’d seen screenshots and designs and the video and even worked with Mike Bracken on a deck talking about how the app fits in to our activities. However, I hadn’t played with it or more importantly made it mine.
I love print dearly. I have such a different relationship with content in print compared to online. I really see my interaction with print as a luxurious thing. It’s partly about permission. The permission to spend time with it. To think deeply, to re-read, to get lost, to allow serendipity to take hold. Online is different. For me online is about information, data, utilitarian experiences. Wonderful, but only very occasionally luxurious.
In my talk at last week’s Rethinking Media, I was talking a bit about how content is atomised by placing it online. How many readers will have no idea if the content they see is part of a story package or part of the front page of the newspaper. They inherit their relationship with that item of content through coming to it from a search. Their intent is clear. They want information and they want it quick. They may not want to explore. Serendipity is lost.
This is how I interact with a newspaper online. I scan for stories in the sections I know are interesting to me. I click on links from my RSS, I click on links my friends share. Each new item of content I see is a bundle of facts, many wonderful and full of interest or value or joy. And after I’ve consumed them I’m on to the next thing. It’s so different from how I explore a printed paper.
For a long while I’ve resorted to reading the free papers on the underground on my way in to work. Although the Berliner is more tube friendly there is still an issue with reading it standing up. There’s an emotional and financial involvement with buying a newspaper to read on your commute. If you don’t get to read it due to overcrowding the disappointment is doubled. Add into that the environmental impact of the large stack of barely read almost mint papers and buying them just doesn’t add up. Before I had my son I read far more, now other things have taken the luxurious time of enjoying a paper and I’ve missed it. The free papers are the equivalent of fast food or the emergency Cornish pasty, they fill a gap but that’s all. I missed the quality writing, the deep introspection of issues and most of all the serendipitous discovery of things through a quality paper.
Radio and newspapers are serendipity engines for me, John Peel was the classic one. I’m still in shock and sadness of his death. The delivery of high quality things you never knew you were interested in is one of the most potent things imaginable. I didn’t get it with the free papers. From them I got the delivery of many time passers which I semi-cared about. However this morning my iPhone delivered the missing magic.
I went from a replay of the live commentary and a match report and gallery of great photos of our 2-1 win over Liverpool yesterday to a wonderful piece on Theresa May, to the ever fabulous Anna Pickard liveblog of yesterday’s Xfactor final to last week’s Charlie Brooker piece. I also read a fair bit of news and then my journey Tooting to Kings Cross was over.
These pieces were all things which I could through the wonder of an offline mode enjoy without pause or delay. No matter how fast your internet connection or the servers at the other end, there is still always a lag online. This feels important from this morning’s experience. The only lag in both the printed page and the iPhone app is the action of page turning. What’s still missing is the proximity of disparate things on a printed page. Of shape and layout related curation and tagging, either intended or unintentional. That though is a form factor thing and some day maybe we’ll find a way to generate juxtapositional layouts.
The serendipity produced by my personal selction and institutional curation was there too and was key. I picked the sections I was interested in, The Guardian editors provided a set of things I’d be interested in and then there were some potluck bits from Features and Most Viewed.
What fascinated me at the end of the experience was that I’d had print like experiences; luxurious, spending-time-with experiences with what had previously been online content. Anna Pickard’s live blog from the Xfactor showed even more the quality of its words when you read it back without distractions like your screen clutter and adverts around it. It was really delicious and exceptionally funny writing. I found myself giggling out loud. You’d never find the live commentary of a match in print and yet it’s story telling experience was fantastic. There was emotion and tension event though I knew the result.
One section of the talk which Mike gave a couple of weeks ago and that I gave in Amsterdam talks about paying for content vs paying for utility. It’s clear which way The Guardian is leaning with this app. Just as you pay for the utility of a printed paper which gives you an experience around the content (in addition to a physical artefact), you do the same thing with this app. It does things for you, it changes your relationship with the content totally, it gives you a new way to experience it and in my experience helps you interact in a deeper and richer way with it.
At a very basic level the utility the app provides is that you can just get the news and read it on the tube on a small portable device but in my view the it goes a bit deeper than that.
