I don't get podcasting

But then I've never had any use for talk radio or audio books either. I understand the technical matters; that's not an obstacle for me. I'm perplexed by the rhetorical purpose of my doing audio. I'm committed to doing it, anyway, and hoping that I'll be able to figure it out. I'm going to teach my students about podcasting next semester and have them do their own podcasts. Perhaps they will appreciate it more than I.

Here's a couple of things that are obstacles for me as both a composer and consumer.

1. One of the things I like about blogging is that I don't have to plan it out. I start with an idea, an exigency, a motive for writing. Then I figure out what I'm going to say as I'm composing. I do go back sometimes and make some edits but mostly a blog is about a process of thinking for me. I can't do that as a podcaster (unless you want to listen to ten seconds of dead air while I scratch my neck and think about what I want to say next or how I want to phrase it). Instead, I have to plan out my podcast. I'm not going to write it all out and read it like a script, but I need an outline. That means I have to figure out what I'm going to say before I say it.

In short, the most valuable aspect of blogging (at least for me as a writer) is completely absent from podcasting.

2. Put briefly, podcasts are neither easily searchable nor scan-able (at least with current tech.). That means I have to listen to an entire podcast to find out what it's about. I also have to rely on someone's description of the content rather than being able to search the content directly.

3. The thing I find most objectionable about podcasting is the element most loudly proclaimed as its great value: now I can capitalize on all that "dead time" I spend driving my car or washing dishes and so on. Multi-tasking is microfascism! To paraphrase John Lennon, "life is what happens to you while you're busy listening to podcasts!"

This is just the complete opposite direction of where I am trying to go with my life. I am striving to be more mindful, to be more fully present: to be driving when I am driving, to be washing dishes when I am washing dishes. To be present to your life is not a waste of time. It is not inefficient to experience one's life.

That said, I am not one to simply separate mediated experiences from immediate ones. Listening to your iPod (music or podcast), talking on your mobile phone, or hooked into some other wireless network, one is still experiencing the material, physical world. After all, there is nothing else for the body to experience. I simply object to this characterization.

Instead of saying my commute is a waste of time; I will use that time to listen to my students' podcast responses to today's readings, instead of saying if I podcast my ideas to students and colleagues then they can make more efficient use of their time, I need to think more about how switching to this new medium to produce a new informational experience both for me as a producer and for others as listeners.

Right now though, I'm just not getting it. 

Comments

[c-m]

Reminds me that a couple days ago, the footer quote on Slashdot was from Mark Twain, "It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."

Writing, speaking -- it's all laborious, idiosyncratic composing no matter how it's sliced and delivered.

To offer my experience, I started listening to podcasts about a year ago before they started exploding in popularity more recently. Back then, I think "dead time" or "thinking time" in podcasts was more acceptable and experimental -- that was when the conglomerate networks hadn't caught on yet and didn't rate in the top 100 on Itunes. The top 100 used to be amateurs and dilettantes -- laborers of love with the medium -- but look what has happened in the past year as the networks caught on to the trend and the medium has become, shall we say, more "professionalized" and now the networks are starting to gain momentum in the top 100. Can't say that this is a welcomed development. And now the ah's, umm's and the ehm's are less acceptable -- less competitive -- even if just as endearing.

As for multi-tasking with podcasts, this is how I look at it: news programs that I might normally take the time to watch when they are scheduled -- PBS, NPR, ABC Nightline, CBS 60 Minutes, etc, etc -- can now be downloaded daily or weekly, and I get to decide when and whether or not I want to listen to them. This means that I can be doing other things during the regularly scheduled programming, and catalog away those I want to listen to for a rainy day. Kind of like a radio-version of TIVO, in a way. I think of it as deslaving from the networks' schedules.

Although I do often wonder how the plethora of podcasts -- and soon-to-be videocasts -- might end-up fraying the communal experience offered by network and even cable television -- no longer will television-viewing be in sync such that a show, e.g., Seinfeld or the Sopranos, becomes clockwork water-cooler chat the next day. I have been thinking recently about how podcasts really do send people into their own pod-like or cocoon-like relationships with media -- less communal and more individualized.

But in terms of academia and teaching specifically, I hear what you're saying -- like with the appearance of email in the early 1990's, what appears on the surface as a new method of efficiency actually means more work and more intrusions into one's private time or down time. Teaching becomes even more of a 24-hour job as the technology eliminates the boundaries.

By the way, check out the Zencast on Itunes, where no stone is unturned. Itunes, I mean, leaves no stone unturned.