I wonder - more radically - if a "magazine" can really exist online at all. What is a magazine after all? They didn't exist until widely available paper and printing presses (the first ones emerged in the eighteenth century). They were ways in which a group of people became a collective by connecting themselves to a physical object - a bunch of pages bound by a stapler - and selling that physical product. Take away the physical product and what do you have left? A reader can simply choose which of the writers he or she wants to read online and ignore the rest. Or a reader can simply read whatever her friends point out to her on Facebook or by emails or social media more generally. The stickiness of one writer to another becomes much less sticky. And the data that reveals just how many readers an individual writer attracts tears one more veil of mystery from the aura of a "magazine."
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