PodCast Away

Nobody speaks for a generation, but sometimes people speak to a generation. Or events. Or a technology. For my generation, I believe the podcast speaks to us, quite literally. My personal podcasting experience is in many ways emblematic of our generation and the ways we work, adapt and evaluate new opportunities.

For one, I’m not clear exactly when and how I first discovered podcasts. In the olden days, you bought new technology. You heard about a new device from a commercial or friend and then you went out to RadioShack or CompUSA and you bought it, whether it was a wireless mouse or a roomba. I think it’d surprise the adults of the 90’s how a revolutionary new technology like podcasting came upon us seemingly unannounced. I think it was 2007 and I had iTunes on my laptop. It periodically asked for updates, which I periodically clicked yes to, and voila one day an indeterminate time after an update I noticed there was a new tab that said ‘podcast.’ I don’t know if I investigated it immediately; after all I’ve barely ever touched the ‘radio’ tab on my iTunes. But pretty soon I realized it filled a gap in my life. Growing up in a northeast suburban house, NPR was on the radio a lot. The news shows dominated airplay time, but when the comedy shows Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and Car Talk were on, my mom would often yell me to come down from the second floor to listen in the kitchen radio. If I missed the Sunday afternoon shows, I’d try to catch the evening segments. If I missed both, I'd have to wait wait forever.

When I moved to college, these shows left my life because radio neither fit the interior requirements of my dorm room nor my spontaneous college schedule. But when I discovered this podcast feature, I searched Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and delighted in sudden access to such forbidden fruit. Amazingly the 50-somethings one hears on NPR are supported by 20-somethings open to new technology, and NPR embraced podcasting early on. I still didn’t listened to podcasts that much initially, because I was rarely alone at my computer for an hour at a time. It’s hard to imagine now but even in 2007, six years after the iPod came out, it wasn’t really socially acceptable to walk around with your headphones on (maybe it still isn’t). Podcasting first gave me real joy while I was taking the Bolt bus back from New York City, and I rolled through three or four Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me episodes. Suddenly, with nighttime illumination that eliminated the option of reading and a phone that could only make calls, I had an alternative to pure boredom. 

That initial podcasting period was about adding radio and TV back into my life. Podcasts gradually started adding new aspects to my life. ChinesePod was even suggested by my professor in Chinese class. Now I regularly listen to 10 podcasts totaling about 12 hours/week, and get supplemented by 4 other podcasts that I tune into less regularly. They are:

NPR Wait Wait Don't Tell (news/humor)
NPR This American Life (artsy journalism)
NPR Planet Money (non academic economics)

NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour
Freakonomics
ESPN BS ReportESPN Pardon the interruptionESPN around the horn
Stuff You Should know (random knowledge)
Sinica - Pop up Chinese (china talk)
It's an absurd number of podcasts with some overlapping range. I also have listened to language learning podcasts in French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Italian and Hindi, to varying degrees of success. I listen on the subway, I listen in bed at night, I listen at work sometimes when doing mundane tasks. I multi-task often and listen with 100% attention very rarely, and sometimes I re-listen to episodes that I didn't properly take in. I am listening to PTI at this very moment. 

If I'm on a plane and listened out I can supplement these 10 with SBS (an Australian Cantonese news radio), the China History Podcast, Radiolab and the Football Ramble. And now I've added Serial into the mix.

Ah Serial. The real reason I'm writing this podcast now. While podcasts have been getting more popular and evolving both artistically and monetarily, they've yet to break into the mainstream. Serial seems to be a major breakthrough, a podcast gone viral. As a story made specifically for the long form weekly medium, it seems to be an introduction to podcasts for many people, including my mom. But for me, the popularity is confusing.  Serial is a spinoff from This American Life and utterly indistinguishable from any other TAL piece, except that it's not broken into acts. Seriously Serial. But This American Life was already fulfilling its market niche via NPR Radio when it entered the world of podcasts, and so it never had its phase where people would say, "You gotta check out this well crafted podcast about American stories." Serial has succeeded because it was good and new, and people love sharing good new stuff now. That said, Serial captures part of why I love podcasts. For whatever reason, I develop a level of familiarity with the podcast hosts in a way I never have with radio or TV personalities. I feel like I can predict how Sarah Koenig will react to certain evidence or how hard she'll laugh at a joke. I feel like I know Bill Simmons way too well, and I desperately want to grab a beer with Sinica's Kaiser Kuo. Maybe it's the length of these episodes, the fact that they seem like one-to-one communication. Koenig has really tapped into this well, and she's handled this really complicated true life story so well. Deciding which disparate elements to air in which episode must be a daunting task. She keeps us coming each week via the age old mystery routine, but I'm not complaining, and now she's asked us for money.

The financial half of the equation is a difficult one. I believe that if I had to give $1/year for each subscribed podcast right now, I would do so. $5 and I'd drop a few. But if any of these podcasts had cost even a cent before I listened to it, there's no way I would have started. The free nature of podcasts has been established and it is the model for getting earballs. Getting new listeners would take a really good podcast with a really evangelical fanbase. Convincing existing listeners to suddenly pay up has its difficulties as well, but I think is actually more feasible.

Suffice to say though, I've gotten tons of enjoyment from podcasts. Freakonomics and Planet Money have shaped my understanding of the global economy. The BS Report has made me laugh so hard. This American Life has made me cry. What multilingual skills I possess are in no small part due to voice actors and podcast technology. PTI allows me to pretend I'm watching NBA and NFL games.

I think that in podcasts, there are many lessons to be learned about internet commerce and the millennial generation. There's some poetry to the technology that magically makes goodness show ps overnight itself magically showing up overnight. It's now here to stay and forever changed how some of us learn, listen and simply walk around.

That last part is probably the most controversial part of our generation - we walk around with headphones on all the time. Such users seem ill-connected to the world, completely unaware and uncaring to the strangers passing them by. Such an assessment would be completely fair. But if I can speak for such consciously unconsciously members of society, we all struggle with it. We all know we look like zombies. We all know we should be enjoying life. But it's so good inside those headphones. It's great to have your own sound track. And with podcasts, the argument gets harder. Yes I can be walking around and being a part of the environment and I am inhabiting...but I am learning about the global economy. But I'm practicing Mandarin. But but but...and that's the double edged sword that's really the problem with the staring-down-at-their-phones age we have entered. We are so much worse at engaging in society...but we're kinda more productive individually. Like podcasts, not everyone has totally figured out the best way to make this work. How we as a society come to grips with these questions that people don't seem to seriously be addressing will define us moving forward,