When we first started talking about going digital, it seemed that all printed paper products would be replaced by the web overnight. Things didn’t go like this, not even in the specific field of culture magazines. Some are “digital natives”, but others have remained in paper format and still others have chosen to add the digital format.
We don’t know how long this very complex situation will last, but also always very conditioned by the high costs of paper. In any case, the advent of the web has profoundly transformed the methods of communication for all magazines, even for those that have decided to remain only on paper, because in the entire universe of human communication a different temporal dimension dominates, that of instant. This does not mean that there will no longer be room for what are called “long thoughts”. If anything, it will be here that the fate of culture magazines will be measured, typically characterized by a greater reflexivity than that of traditional periodical publications.
Potentially the space would be enormous, no matter if online or not. As we know more and more, communication takes place on social media, in apparently free forms, but in reality conditioned by the owners of the large platforms. Where, as someone rightly said, communication is free only because you are not the buyer but the product to be sold, with your data that is so tempting for many, in the markets of goods as well as in the markets of politics. However, this is very poor information and communication, as well as dominated by the moment.
The present state of the traditional media in Italy lends itself to even sadder considerations. Aside from the fact that newspaper sales are in free fall (compared to a magazine audience that has always been much more limited but more resistant), it is above all the quality of television information that has declined in recent decades. Broadcasts of information, including political ones, practically do not exist, just as political debate no longer exists. It is the journalists who sing an endless mass alone among themselves on talk shows. The politician, when there is one, is a kind of special guard surrounded by journalists, the usual ones in every broadcast, who inevitably recite a script. Where is pluralism in these conditions? Italian television will not be Russian television. But it is dominated by cartels that produce increasingly faded information, obscured by the protagonism and narcissism of the majority.
On the somewhat opposite side we can place the strictly scientific information and training produced by universities and research centres. Here the quality can also be remarkable. But the language is almost always too specialized to be able to address the general public (thus becoming one of the factors fueling populism).
Between social communications and television entertainment that do not provide real information on the one hand, and the too elitist products of universities and research centers, there is now a desert. Or rather, there is a space that could still be occupied by culture magazines, which could certainly produce quality information, but under certain conditions.
Here the role of political culture magazines becomes crucial. That is, of those magazines which, in expressing a political tradition with more or less marked features, have compared it with others, and at the same time have opened themselves up to different forms and expressions of culture widespread in society. Yet the interactions between political culture magazines have not been greater than the very limited ones that have characterized cultural magazines in general. One might have thought that this was due to the ideological conflicts of the first phase of the Republic. But after the collapse or radical transformation of the parties that had originally generated those magazines, the fences were kept very high, as if they could have the same explanation. They must be destroyed before it is too late.