A Cultural Counterrevolution Against a Digitized World

The end of 'Sports Illustrated' isn't about 'Sports Illustrated'.

The sheet has been pulled over Sports Illustrated.

Cue the outpouring of grief from Boomers and middle-aged men who hold a special morsel of nostalgia for the analog days of mailbox appointments and magazines shoved in backpacks to scour over at the bus or at kitchen tables with friends after school – or the pre-porn everywhereness of the SI Swimsuit Issue (also, R.I.P. 1990s Supermodels who had the most All American, girl-next-door beauty bodies that didn’t destroy or distort to death girls’ self-image). Cue the retrospectives and wistful looks at past B-I-G sports moments, the icons who graced the pages, and the stories that missed the mark or those that seem quaint in light of modern athletic advances.

This isn’t one of those. Look, I love sports. I LOVE SPORTS. I remember SI as one of the only magazines we got at our house besides the Sears and JCPenney catalogs from which we ordered our school clothes. I grew up playing, watching, and living sports. The Olympics were practically taken as holy holidays. What might have been in the eyes of a girl who grew up in a pool, formative years spent idolizing Janet Evans, watching Michael Jordan accomplish inhuman feats of airborne theatrics, Wayne Gretzky set another record, Tiger Woods redefine golf in his own image, and Kirby Puckett be every Minnesota kid’s hero.

So…now what? Do we resign ourselves to the digital overlords, or is this a moment we take to reassess virtuality as taking something away from us and replacing it with a worse version of ourselves and our lives in the name of convenience and compressed intelligence?

I don’t want to toss people’s very real and heartfelt SI memories into the bin, giving it a swift kick and a curt “1992 called and it wants your Oakland Raiders starter jacket back.” But we’ve been very unceremoniously digging shallow graves for our analog treasures and shoveling dirty over them for decades. So forgive me if I’m not sympathetic to those who sob when the Digital Jabberwock comes for your favorite piece of childhood innocence.

The truth is that SI has been on the decline for decades. The first blow was the dominance of magazine-news television and ESPN. Born in 1979, the two platforms probably helped each other infuse the culture with sports and appeal of athletics as a social pillar. But as television became the dominant force in line with demand for faster, more up-to-the-minute analysis and reaction, the long-form, weekly delivery model of print magazines faded. This wasn’t unique to sports. The Saturday Evening Post, first published in 1821, grew to the most popular and largest circulated weekly magazine in the country from the 1920s to the 1960s, especially among America’s middle class. The magazine commissioned artists like Norman Rockwell and John Philip Falter to document and reflect the life of average readers, humorous scenes, or significant cultural events. Many of the cover illustrations were famously reproduced for artists’ collections.

The publications featured great artwork and illustrations, short stories, long-form profiles, and thoughtful reporting — all accessible to a wide swath of America’s middle class, exposing them to different forms of art and writing previously reserved for the upper classes. “Culture” went mainstream, and with it, a move towards nationalizing experience and narrative. An American culture was reborn.

LIFE magazine traveled along the same trajectory as the Post in the general interest forum. The publication excelled at photojournalism, a peek into the power of visual arts and the hold it was beginning to have in the culture at large (Arguably the most iconic image of Modern America is Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph of a nurse in a sailor's arms in Times Square on V-J Day, August 14, 1945. These are just two examples of many in weekly magazines’ long, popular reign. While Harper’s and The Atlantic took on more intellectual and fine art content, the Post and LIFE, along with Reader’s Digest and Time appealed to a general audience (even the regional cosmopolitan-centric The New Yorker and later New York magazine).

The publishing empires of the 20th century were something to behold, creating generational wealth by their titan-masters and influencing politics, culture — even foreign policy. William Randolph Hearst had his hand mostly in his multi-market newspapers. Hearst’s New York Journal rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World contributed widely to sensationalism, yellow journalism, and political narratives shaping public policy and Americans’ worldviews. But Hearst also diversified, having controlling interests in book publishing and magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Town and Country, and Harper's Bazaar.

But if Hearst was the progressive-leaning, “also-ran”-politician newspaper titan, Henry Luce was his Republican magazine mogul counterpart. Luce was the founder of Time, Life, Fortune, and… Sports Illustrated. Luce acquired the name indirectly from its creator, Stuart Scheftel, and launched the weekly magazine on August 16, 1954, despite advisors arguing against it claiming it didn’t involve serious journalism. But the rise of national sports on television and prosperous, leisure-minded post-war America made it a success. And rather than “dumbing down,” SI proved its journalistic merit, even running a story (with pictures!) of famed Lolita author and writer Vladimir Nabokov on a butterfly hunt: “An Absence of Wood Nymphs” in September 1959.

Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Luce in New York City, 1954

Between these publications, he helped shape the perceptions and views of millions of Americans on politics, art, literature, current events, lifestyle, finance, business, and sports and leisure. Luce would have a heavy hand in the “China Lobby” and would author the famed “The American Century” essay for LIFE in the February 17, 1941 issue (pp 61-65). [Do follow the link if only for the perfect 1941 time capsule of a print magazine — advertisements and all] Luce’s second wife, Clare Boothe Luce was an influential conservative leader, writer, and politician in her own right. The essay, and Luce himself, through his publications and activism, helped shape the aesthetic of mid-20th century America. Instead of the polarization and atomization of endless algorithms, monetizing views, and considering people no greater than their transactional value as the commercialization and consumerism of television and to a much greater extent — astronomically so — the internet and social media, print and analog media has a cohesive, contemplative character that respected the consumer and the creator and left (not always…) the consumerism to ads and marketing. It appealed to a greater sensibility.

The publishing world — newspapers, magazines, and books to some extent, had a large sway over a reading public. But, as video would kill the radio star in the music world, then at television’s hands was the mass murder of print publications; it would be a painful death. Eventually, rather than complementing each other, television would supplant the written word as a learning tool, a source of news and entertainment, and for cultural adhesion. The rise of teevee tracked with general interest magazines’ downfall, and social media and the internet were the final nail in the coffin. Contrary to many culture warriors, I don’t think “woke” or ideology was the impetus for SI’s collapse. The magazine’s circulation had been on the decline for decades. Going all-in on turning out content without substance (including using AI “writers”) had more to do with SI’s demise.

So, we return to the beginning and face a choice: reward publications that respect our intelligence, invest in their writers and creators, and leave themselves separate from tools of partisan hyperpolitical propaganda and invest in readership, reject the digitization and atomization of ourselves and our kids, and look to physical, tangible, spiritual and foundational elements of a meaningful life — or continue along the endless scrolling highway-to-nowhere in which our pleasure receptors are pinged, but our minds are left starving and we are left alone — with our devices, playing games or watching movies or worshipping in the safety of our homes, ordering groceries, meals, clothes, even dates online, displacing the communal experience and talking, debating, exchanging ideas, growing outlooks and understanding, and believing in the inherent value of our neighbors. And that is where traditional and analog media play an important role. We aren’t held hostage to the button-pushing algorithm, whether the button is personal pleasure or anger.

Television, especially cable teevee, hardened the silos around ideology, blurring the lines between information, entertainment, and hyperbole. Social media and the digital world exacerbated it. Online is a departure from the permanence we crave. From the bowdlerization of movies, books, and music, to physical media’s extinction:

The Walt Disney Company, like many other entertainment giants, are moving away from all forms of physical media. The sales of DVDs and Blu-rays have been in decline for years – especially with the advent of streaming and even more so with the launch of Disney Plus.

Disney has already announced the closure of its Movie Club in Canada and according to multiple media sources, the Walt Disney Company will be no longer distributing physical media in Australia.

This is a problem worthy of its own discussion. Fortunately, Brett R. Smith and Lisa De Pasquale explain it in a recent episode of Pop Culture Warriors*

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There has been a serious, intentional effort to revive or cultivate analog media. I don’t think the magazine publishing world has hit rock bottom, but there’s an opening for a broad appeal monthly publication in a way that Walter Kirn’s new County Highway newspaper has accomplished in a short amount of time. It will go a long way to return America to a more cohesive national character if we revive and uplift general interest, as LIFE did with the astronauts (and their wives!) in the 1950s and ‘60s, making heroes and household names of these daring men who served their country and helped craft America as a global leader in perilous times.

The book publishing industry has been a mess for decades, as chronicled by Alex Perez in The Free Press and in his Substack recently. The antidote could be to seek out niche publishing houses such as Slate Books, “An independent, not-for-profit literary press specializing in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, philosophy, theology, and belles lettres. Slant books are marked by the kind of meticulous craft and passion for language that are harder and harder to come by in our age of instant publishing and literary gimmickry. These are books that will lodge themselves in readers’ lives.”

The biggest unreported news might be in the music industry. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, in 2022, revenues for total digital music downloads declined, but revenues for physical media — especially vinyl records — grew.

Total physical revenues of $1.7 billion were up 4% versus the prior year. Revenues from vinyl records grew 17% to $1.2 billion — the sixteenth consecutive year of growth — and accounted for 71% of physical format revenues. For the first time since 1987, vinyl albums outsold CDs in units (41 million vs 33 million).

Good news for Minnesota-based Copycats Media, a vinyl record pressing facility based in Minnesota. [You can watch a short news clip about the company I came across from our local news station here.]

This is about replacing the tangible, foundational, patience-building impatience of a thoughtful, meaningful society with the ethereal, impermanent, throw-away casualness of the digital age. Not to go all “Get off my lawn!” Clint Eastwood Gran Torino meme, but holy ADHD, Batman! And the terrible truth whispered through your AirPod implant is that a faster, more expedient way of life doesn’t equate to better. Often, it just means more expectations are heaped on days limited by time (pesky rules of the universe) at the expense of quality use of that time — or at least our sanity. We chase ease and comfort in exchange for the discomfort and difficulty of learning and scroll endlessly through virtual reality and digital emptiness in search of meaning and validation. It is odd that we have myriad ways to convenientize life but have less time — to enjoy it, examine it, and share it.

Maybe a return to a slower, deeper, more contemplative practice of paging through a literary magazine, a collection of short stories, reading a record’s liner notes while it plays from beginning to end, or picking up that old copy (VHS?) of Casablanca and watching it with your kids — or the original Looney Tunes for the little ones — is a way of taking a pause from the firehose of outrage and anger and immediate gratification and breathing in the fresh air of imaginative creation, human bonding, and introspective thoughtfulness.

*Do check out Lisa’s Substack, BRIGHT, a daily newsletter highlighting the biggest (and some lesser-seen) stories in the news, pop culture, fashion, and entertainment. As the name implies, she is very bright and an uplifting start to each day: