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2018 | Book

Introduction: Podcasting and Podcasts—Parameters of a New Aural Culture Read chapter Read first chapter

Podcasting

New Aural Cultures and Digital Media

Editors: Dr. Dario Llinares, Dr. Neil Fox, Dr. Richard Berry

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary collection of academic research exploring the definition, status, practices and implications of podcasting through a Media and Cultural Studies lens. By bringing together research from experienced and early career academics alongside audio and creative practitioners, the chapters in this volume span a range of approaches in a timely reaction to podcasting’s zeitgeist moment.

In conceptualizing the podcast, the contributors examine its liminal status between the mechanics of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media and between differing production contexts, in addition to podcasting’s reliance on mainstream industrial structures whilst retaining an alternative, even outsider, sensibility. In the present tumult of online media discourse, the contributors frame podcasting as indicative of a ‘new aural culture’ emerging from an identifiable set of industrial, technological and cultural circumstances. The analyses in this collection offer a range of interpretations which begin to open avenues for further research into a distinct Podcast Studies.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
1. Introduction: Podcasting and Podcasts—Parameters of a New Aural Culture
Abstract
In this introductory chapter, the editors set out the technological, industrial and cultural contexts which have facilitated the emergence of podcasting and podcasts as a ‘new aural culture’. Drawing on their own experiences as podcast producers, listeners and theorists they explore the unique circumstances through which podcasting has evolved into a discreet form, despite existing in a simultaneously symbiotic relationship with a host of mediums. The introduction also sets out the parameters of podcast studies and introduces the book’s chapters as developments of the previous nascent research, while furthering avenues of enquiry reflective of podcasting’s increasingly influential status in the digital media landscape.
Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry
2. ‘Just Because You Play a Guitar and Are from Nashville Doesn’t Mean You Are a Country Singer’: The Emergence of Medium Identities in Podcasting
Abstract
This chapter seeks to assert that podcasts are a distinct media form and that although they might exhibit a ‘radioness’, they should be treated as a medium in their own right. This distinctiveness has been achieved over time through a process in which podcasters have asserted their own media identity. The chapter maps this development process using business models and a survey of practising podcasters, concluding that a new lens of ‘podcast studies’ is required to fully appreciate the nuances of this medium.
Richard Berry
3. Podcast Movement: Aspirational Labour and the Formalisation of Podcasting as a Cultural Industry
Abstract
Podcasting has thrived since its creation in 2004 as a bastion for home-grown, amateur media production. In the past several years, however, entrepreneurs and legacy media companies have rapidly expanded their interests in podcasting, bringing with them professional standards and the logics of capital. This chapter explores how discourses of formalisation and specialisation come together at 2016 Podcast Movement convention, the largest annual convention of podcasters in the United States. Based upon participant observations and a review of trade press articles, this chapter explores some of the deep tensions between two competing discourses at Podcast Movement: the formalisation of podcasting production practices, and utopianism of self-expression, authenticity, democratisation, and media diversity. These tensions are indicative of a broader struggle for podcasting’s identity.
John L. Sullivan
4. Podcast Networks: Syndicating Production Culture
Abstract
This chapter investigates the much overlooked aspect of podcast networks in contemporary US podcast production culture. Emerging networks bring together individual podcasts and their producers under one organisation and make possible several inter-podcast practices. Based on interviews with executives of three newly formed podcast networks (The Heard, Radiotopia and Relay FM), their production cultures are reviewed in light of commodification models for cultural products. The chapter shows how, within the cultures of the podcast networks, the formation of these conglomerations is predominantly motivated by the advantages provided in terms of overcoming gatekeeping mechanisms, exploiting niche and longtail audiences, the exchange of social capital, and discoverability. As such, these motivations highlight a tension between podcasting’s promise of disruption and the mainstream/ commercial logic that reigns over podcasting production culture.
Lieven Heeremans
5. ‘I Know What a Podcast Is’: Post-Serial Fiction and Podcast Media Identity
Abstract
This article explores a developing sub-genre of highly popular fiction podcasts emergent from the success of WBEZ’s Serial (2014). While numerous press commentators have branded such podcasts derivative, or as “trying too hard to be like Serial” (McFarland, Fiction podcasts are trying too hard to be like Serial, www.​wired.​com. 2015) this overlooks the crucial fact that Serial is not just an extension of effective radio journalism aesthetic and form, but rather offers an inherently and importantly successful, sympathetic utilisation and expression of its unique podcast media identity. Furthermore, discourses of derivation ignore the extent to which such shows expand upon Serial’s blueprint. From exploring a broad sampling of what we term post-Serial fiction, this chapter argues that audio-drama takes a new and critically important shape as the first explicitly podcast-oriented audio-fiction form.
Danielle Hancock, Leslie McMurtry
6. Invisible Evidence: Serial and the New Unknowability of Documentary
Abstract
Ora uses the first season of Sarah Koenig’s Serial to launch comparisons between 1990s documentary film theory and contemporary claims of ‘post-truth‘ in new media. The politics of testimony and memory, visual proof and its credulity, and, ultimately, the role of narrative voice within online culture contribute to decoding the text and reception of this wildly successful podcast. Ora demonstrates that, just as theorists including Linda Williams heralded the end of the ironclad image with Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, scholars may similarly position Serial as a case study for seismic shifts in non-fiction media and its reception.
Rebecca Ora
7. Podcasting as Liminal Praxis: Aural Mediation, Sound Writing and Identity
Abstract
Podcasting has been adopted by a host of academics, writers and artists in ways that both enhance, but also diversify from, their primary field of interest or mode of communication. In this chapter Dario Llinares, film academic and co-creator of The Cinematologists Podcast, reflects on his own experience of podcasting production, presentation and dissemination, and analyses interviews with a range of such podcast adopters, to conceptualise the ways in which the medium provokes a self-reflexive interrogation of one’s identity as a mediated and mediating subject. Through an exploration of podcasting praxis—the enactment and subsequent acquisition of knowledge through materialised audio practice—Llinares examines how a range of podcasters assess the effects of working in this audio format, particularly in terms of its potential challenge to the logocentric basis of information communication. Furthermore, Llinares argues that podcasting represents a regeneration of the dialectical possibilities of audio and, concomitantly, reopens debates as to how the form and process of mediation are fundamentally implicated in the formation of knowledge.
Dario Llinares
8. Wild Listening: Ecology of a Science Podcast
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a growing area of research focused on points of convergence between scientific and humanities discourses, with ecology and ecological modes receiving special attention. This chapter examines an ecological framework evidenced in the podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind, exploring how, both theoretically and practically, podcasting can be used to engage complex ecological concepts. Analysing Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the broader context of the conversational science podcast, this chapter examines podcasting’s surprising potential to challenge top-down and linear logics, to diverge toward a more complex ecological epistemology, and to express network relations as they play out within the living systems of cultural products.
Danielle Barrios-O’Neill
9. The Podcast as an Intimate Bridging Medium
Abstract
In this chapter, Swiatek argues that the podcast can be conceived as an intimate bridging medium: a means of communication that generates a sense of intimacy among listeners who are physically separate from each other, thus enabling boundaries of knowledge and context to be crossed. The chapter also suggests that while the technology of podcasting can be conceived in terms of its equalising potential, the digital public sphere in which it exists is unequal. Specifically, many of the hierarchies in other media systems are replicated in the realm of podcasting, which, in turn, prevents bridging from being as successful as it could be. These arguments are illustrated through an in-depth analysis of an episode from the podcast series Nobel Prize Talks.
Lukasz Swiatek
10. Inner Ears and Distant Worlds: Podcast Dramaturgy and the Theatre of the Mind
Abstract
This chapter draws from phenomenology to argue that podcasts provide the opportunity for audio-dramaturgy to instigate a radical break with the limits placed on it by radio technology. It questions prevalent theoretical characterisations of audio-drama as the theatre of the mind, understood intellectually and deliberatively, rather than immanently, due to the evanescent, amorphous nature of sound. Instead, the chapter draws from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to posit that listening to audio-drama is fundamentally a bodily experience, and the conception of the theatre of the mind arises from the confines of the medium of radio, rather than the sonic nature of audio-drama. Podcasts, it concludes, allow for a move away from conventional radio practices and toward more sonorous and bodily forms of audio-dramaturgy.
Farokh Soltani
11. A Feminist Materialisation of Amplified Voice: Queering Identity and Affect in The Heart
Abstract
The amplified voice through podcasting as an intimate aural medium carries with it the possibilities for a deep affective experience for both the creator and the listener. This chapter presents the materialisation of voice as the context for an exploration into queering of gender and sexuality in podcasting through sound production and vocal performance. The author focuses on the aurally affective experiences and performative acts conveyed in the Radiotopia podcast series The Heart—formerly known as Audio Smut—a podcast exploring intimacy and humanity. Through this case study, Copeland argues that as an intimate aural medium, podcasting offers a powerful listening-centred platform to challenge gendered stereotypes and heteronormativities within visual-philic Western culture by engaging with the listener through the affective use of sound.
Stacey Copeland
12. Comedian Hosts and the Demotic Turn
Abstract
Podcasting is a showcase for what cultural studies scholar Graeme Turner coined ‘the demotic turn’ or the increasing visibility of the ‘ordinary person’ in the today’s media landscape. Collins argues that the emergence of a particular breed of podcasts—comedian-hosted interviews with celebrities—function in an ‘off-label’ manner as a form of self-help or vicarious therapy. The emergence and rapid growth of this genre can be attributed to three main factors: a confessional culture, the triumph of experience over expertise, and the democratisation allowed by the form’s technology. She explores the link between emotional intimacy and comedy, and analyses podcasts like Marc Maron’s WTF that are, in expression, a rejection of the pedestal version of stardom.
Kathleen Collins
13. Using a Humour Podcast to Break Down Stigma Around Illness
Abstract
Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt and Buchholtz analyse comedy and illness podcast series Sickboy from the perspective of collaborative media to examine the potential of such productions to support civic engagement. The authors conduct an ethnographic investigation using the concept of the circuit of culture to frame their discussion. By examining the production, text, audience and lived cultures related to the podcast, this chapter takes a comprehensive look at the collaborative production and funding, the use of seriality and structure to foster empowerment and norm-making in the texts, and analyse social media linked to the podcast to understand the audience’s reactions. The chapter presents an analysis of how three young male hosts discuss the issues of illness with people affected and how that amplifies the voices, and enhances the visibility, of the lived experiences of people with disabilities.
Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Johanna Willstedt Buchholtz
14. Welcome to the World of Wandercast: Podcast as Participatory Performance and Environmental Exploration
Abstract
Wilson reveals the value of the podcast medium when rendered both as a mode of participatory performance, or performative audio, and as a research tool. The chapter shines new light on traditional podcast forms by considering examples that operate at the fringes of the medium. Using his own creation, Wandercast, as a model—in comparison with other notable examples—Wilson explores how performative podcasts employ the portability and aural intimacy of the medium to invite dynamic interaction between listener and environment. When listeners engage with these artworks, Wilson argues, new modes of perceiving, performing, and being can result. Wilson’s analysis uses ecological and phenomenological lenses in combination. Together, they foreground performative podcasts’ capacity to both exemplify perceptual processes and recalibrate listeners’ relationships with their environments.
Robbie Z. Wilson
15. An Interview with Richard Herring
Abstract
The writer and comedian Richard Herring has emerged as one of the foremost practitioners of British podcasting in terms of exposure and innovation. This long-form interview ends this edited collection with a detailed practitioner’s view of a number of historic and contemporary issues that have impacted podcasting or been brought about by its emergence. The interview covers podcasting as identity, funding structures, audiences and approaches to form, and covers a diverse collection of thoughts and key-points that attempt to bring together many of core strands that run through this collection and, more generally, the ‘podcast moment’.
Neil Fox
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Podcasting
Editors
Dr. Dario Llinares
Dr. Neil Fox
Dr. Richard Berry
Copyright Year
2018
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-90056-8
Print ISBN
978-3-319-90055-1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90056-8