The functional differentiation of the printed surf magazine in the digital age of leisure reading
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study utilises media substitution theory as the primary theoretical lens to investigate whether the leisure reading of printed surf magazines remains influential in surfing subculture in the face of digital media disruption. Using a mixed methods approach, data were derived from an online survey of 1039 Australian surfers followed by 17 semi-structured interviews. Comparisons were made between participants from the generational cohort Gen-Z and a combined cohort of older age groups. Findings revealed that despite Gen-Z’s habitual social media use, this generational cohort of Australian surfers has low levels of trust in social media and high levels of trust in surf magazines. The reading of surf magazines was found to exert influence on individual and group identity. Conclusions around the functional differentiation of surf magazines in this digital age reveal how and why the reading of surf magazines remains integral to the subculture and overall success of the surf industry. The findings are relevant to scholars interested in sport media leisure reading, the media channel choices of Gen-Z, as well as industry practitioners that target lifestyle, youth and niche leisure sport markets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".