Places and Spaces: Skydive Mag and Why You Should Read It

Modern information and technology culture has become a sort of zero-sum game. You can listen to any music you wish within seconds, but none of it will ever mean as much as when you had to spend time and effort seeking it out. One can follow GPS traffic directions with ruthless efficiency, all the while neglecting to meander and look at the world. You can endlessly consume what you are easily given, while routinely overlooking the importance of questioning its quality, motivation and accuracy. You can have information, provided that by degrees it becomes only the information we want you to have.

Although somewhat guarded by a layer of cryptic specificity, niche activities such as skydiving are not immune to the ebb and flow of how we create and share information. A quick tour around social media’s general version of how our sport functions will demonstrate that it is total chaos out there. Sure, the fancy projects and meaningful efforts get some traction, but can easily be outmatched in engagement by baffling examples of the most rudimentary parachuting skill. For every zesty, hyper-aware shitpost that gives you a quick tickle, there is another video by some vacuous, helmetless nincompoop trapezing off the side of a balloon, trapped in a Sisyphean battle with that one time their views picked up. For each thoughtful, labour-intensive project that contributes to our collective forward progress, there exists another adventure lifestyle grifter selling that helicopter dangle to the outside world as the pinnacle of skydiving badassery, all in service of them shifting whey powder or their guide to ice baths or whatever. The good news is that all of the most important things you do in skydiving happen in person, so you can take it or leave it when it comes to the content on offer while you are at home.

General nonsense, suspect contributions and wildly varying opinions are not new to skydiving, so developing a sophisticated filter for bullshit is a crucial part of your toolkit and the best way to remain safe. This extends to the material you consume while away from the dropzone, as we are firmly in an era where objective truth is an inconvenience to be cast aside in favour of personal goals. Quality media does exist though, in various contemporary forms, and should be celebrated whenever it is found.

Small corners of the internet persist, where meaningful work is curated and presented. Podcasts often contain a lot of waffle, but hiding inside are some wild and profound stories. Now and then, an established, old-school 16:9 filmmaker worthy of turning your phone sideways for, will upload a banger. Zoom-call seminars remind everyone of work, but once in a while can contain multitudes. Paywalled personalised remote coaching exists, and probably has worthy examples to present, but you will have to ask someone else about their results.

Written word content is complicated. For a writer (or indeed a photographer), nothing is ever quite as good as a physical magazine arriving with your work in it. Back in the day this was how things got done – with every major skydiving nation producing its own magazine (alongside a choice few independent publications). The game was as such… There is little or no money involved (save the odd unicorn gig), but contributions would earn you some community status, and useful juice with actual or potential sponsors. That is pretty much it, except maybe the warm internal feeling of having simply contributed to your people.

Content then began to shift media, becoming ever easier and more efficient to produce. Traditional magazines felt the squeeze from endless free content, with funding via paid advertising harder to attract. Thinning relevance started diluting the aforementioned juice and status, which made quality contributions harder to entice. Round and round we go. The problem is that when everyone can make and share things really easily, loads of it sucks.

Industry scuttlebutt has always been a thing. From people bitching around campfires about the agenda and politics of the various association magazines, through the flame wars of the Dropzone.com forums, via skydivers learning how to make memes, to the initially convenient aggregation of our communication networks by Facebook – subsequently supplanted by the seeming endgame of dragging us all down on its journey to existing only as tedious (and arguably net evil) slop.

Tucked away at the CYPRES factory in Germany is an archive of every piece of printed material that we have advertised in or contributed to since our unit was released in 1991. The speed at which this grows has now dwindled to a minimum, as one by one another publication falls by the wayside. Now we must seek out new ways to connect with a global skydiving community. Online spaces that can be trusted and valued for level-headed communication and discourse are few. They should be protected and valued.

Skydive Mag functions in a growing capacity as a return to somewhere digital that you can get actual information from. Skydiving needs a useful hub through which to share knowledge and experience, and where industry professionals, plate-spinning their way through a career, can find a stable readership to help validate their efforts. The important factor is curation. It is worth the effort to engage with a place online that is guided by those with a complex, nuanced level of investment in our sport, growing and developing in the right way.