I started reading Personal Computer World in 1981, I was twelve years old. I must be said that this was rather an odd thing for a twelve year old kid to do back then because PCW, like most serious publications at that time, was mainly aimed at business people and serious users rather than kids at school, and it would be more than ten years before broader appeal magazines like PC Pro would emerge to cater for the then fledgling PC clone geek market.
I clearly remember lying in bed one night, poring over the review of the new Apple Lisa (a failed, proto-Macintosh ancestor) and a later issue that hailed G.E.M. as the future of the WYSIWYG interface, among many other emerging technologies. In the early eighties, magazines like PCW were awe inspiring monthly glances into a world of tech wonder. These guys were living right out on the bleeding edge and we hung on every word of their latest breaking dispatches. I would go on to buy small forests worth of computer publications throughout the next twenty years.
But I haven't purchased a computer magazine for some months, and can't envisage ever doing so again - something my mother who had to contend with my 'fire hazard' obsession back then, will find difficult to accept today.
In a delicious irony, technology - the very thing that served so admirably as such dynamic and alluring fodder for these publications down the years - has finally bitten the hand that fed it. It may not have seemed like it twenty years ago, but the frequency and rate of technology change, more than ably covered in rags like PCW, was a gentle pitter-patter compared with the Mini-gun roar of today's tech world.
And to make matters worse, today an announcement can be made at 11am, and quite literally before the speaker has left the stage, it's already been digested, dissected, blogged, linked, commented upon, pulled apart and recombined by hundreds of web journalists and bloggers. By lunchtime it's own new page on Wikipedia has already seen more than fifty edits, and by dinnertime who cares any more?
Then three weeks later, passing almost without notice, the same 'blazing' story appears on the front page of a glossy computer magazine perched on a shelf in WH Smiths; a magazine now so out of kilter with the clock speed of the modern age that the readers usually know more about the so-called news than the poor hack who wrote the stuff weeks earlier.
Such publications have since fallen into a general state of intellectual disrepair, unable to compete in the age of the web, and instead seem increasingly reliant on attention grabbing devices like
101 things to do with your [insert technology]
- for the third time in seven issues, hoping somehow that nobody will notice - or inert, inconsequential opinion pieces about which is the better, iPod or iRiver.
And it's not just computer magazines, but generally anything to do with technology; whether that is home cinema, mobile phones or anything fast moving. It appears the single exception to this rule is
Wired
, whose volumes continue sail above the general tech-clatter thus earning it the sole right to nick a little more of my bookcase every month.
Overall, I think it's a shame. But it's also just another case of 'live by the sword, die by the sword' which applies not only to technology journalism, but to the very process of technology innovation and creation too.
Rarely you'll find an industry as emotionally conflicted as the technology industry; for as humans it's in our make-up to wallow gloriously in past successes, to celebrate the golden age of our pioneering endeavours. But then in the blink of an eye, those self-same technologists despise nothing more than those same outmoded products that currently stand between them and the buzz they get by aggressively campaigning against them with the latest, washes-whiter-than-white, innovations.
Medical practioners would label that self-harming behaviour. But I can only suppose that's what you get when your parentage is as unforgiving as capitalism and innovation.
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