Week 6: Star Touch

This week’s blog theme concerning the page prompted me to think through the apps that I use on a regular basis that does something interesting with the form of the page. I immediately thought of the relative new Toronto Star iPad app, “Star Touch.” The app offers a much more interactive approach to reading and viewing the news than many of the news apps by mainstream newspapers. There is a “tactileness” to the app beyond the conventional news apps. It appears less "static" than most digital pages from news apps. Indeed, it would appear that the app attempts to bring back memories/the experience of flipping through an actual newspaper. The “Star Touch” promotional material claims, “The News is New again. Bring a world of information right to your fingertips. Touch, tap and swipe to discover rich daily coverage, emerging stories and a fresh look at your favourite Star features.” This being said, it doesn't mimic flipping through a newspaper. It offers a different experience.

Screenshot of the February 26 edition of Star Touch.

Obviously, information at our “fingertips” is nothing new. Rather, where the “Star Touch” differs from other newspaper apps, is that a single page or news story often contains several features, or ways to interact. Often superimposed over an image that takes up the entire screen, there is the traditional news story, in text form, and often images to swipe through, or a video to stream, or an interactive infographic to browse. For more in-depth stories, there are subheadings leading to the various ways to interact with the story.

Screenshot of the February 26 edition of Star Touch.

In some ways, the app condenses information that may appear on a full page in the actual newspaper (think of feature or in-depth stories). How do people consume information that is found across a full newspaper page? How do they consume the same information hidden in various levels in the app? Are there huge cognitive differences that reveal or hidden associations between the aspects (text, pictures, images, graphics, infographics) of the news story? Piper argues that this sort of “zooming” “bursts through the page’s two-dimensionality.” However, in having to perform zooming to access the information “suggests a constant quest for the beneath”[1] Piper suggests that “[p]athways allow us to do things over again, they are the technologies of recurrence, perfectibility, and survival.”[2] The disappearing nature of the digital paper—its “ephemerality”[3]—challenges the digital pages ability to maintain what pathways ought to do. Is there too much lost in the quest for the beneath? 

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[1] Andrew Piper, "Turning the Page (Roaming, Zooming, Streaming)," in Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 56

[2] Ibid., 54.

[3] Ibid., 58.