The Sex Magazine

I used to collect magazines. It was a nice hobby, a little pretentious some might say, but it gave me joy and also a sense of being connected with the world. In my early teenage years it was a good way to spend the little money I earned writing articles. On the other hand, it did take a lot of space from my small room.

A week ago, when I was searching inside some old boxes looking for a marketing book, one of these magazines called my attention.The piece was written from a literary "gonzo" point of view. The magazine name was "Etiqueta Negra" and it included stories about sex in modern times.

I reviewed the pages and after a couple of minutes something amazed me. I realized that over the last years, five or seven I would say, readers have started getting bored very fast; so fast that books and magazines shortened they articles and chapters, and reduced the punctuation to its minimum.

 

Years ago, many authors emphasized pauses. There were more punctuation signs to help the reader to make a pause; a mandatory instant of reflection.

Nowadays, there is noise everywhere, but little to no silence, no pauses, no white pages. no pictures framed. The images and colorful backgrounds now tend to invade the whole page canvas. Today, you just need a nice picture and few columns to create an article. 

 

After thinking about this particular I noticed that a hundred years ago the same occurred. Nowadays is almost impossible to find anybody who reads long articles (10 to 17 pages), much less thick books such as the complete version of 'Dante's Inferno', 'The Quixote', 'King Lear', 'Faust' or even 'Les Miserables.'

 

Will those times come back? Will we discover ourselves longing for a 600 page title that includes dramatic pauses every two or three pages?

 

Perhaps some articles would eventually evolved into some form of images, like those abstract paintings some people love to see but don't dare to judge. Maybe we will come to a time where a book will merely display some odd black and white picture of somebody's armpit and the word 'liquor' highlighted in yellow. Who knows? An image that almost everybody unison might consider the next literary masterpiece while some of us will be looking for old magazines in cardboard boxes.