What's a podcast?

Here's a number: more than 1 billion active monthly YouTube users view podcast content of some kind on the platform. 

Aside from being another data point indicating that more and more people are getting information and entertainment through podcasts, this fact also raises the question of whether the term "podcast" brings to mind something you listen to or something you watch. Podcasts - as audio-only content - have been around for 20 years, deriving their name from a particular Apple device for listening to music and other audio content. Podcasts, as a category, were fairly niche for most of that time - the vast majority of Americans, let alone people around the world, did not listen to any podcasts. Starting in 2013, they start to trend upwards, though not at the hyperbolic or exponential rate of, say, adoption of social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok. Gradually, podcasts became part of the average American's information diet. But like social media, video streaming platforms, and every other high-choice information medium of the 21st century, podcasts offered seemingly infinite variety in terms of topics and perspectives. A few superstars dominated the podcast charts, but the distribution tail was long and listenership fragmented - most listeners never listened to the most popular podcasts. 

During the pandemic, video streaming took off, owing its popularity to the prolonged shutdown of traditional media production. It's funny/sad to look back to the early stages of the pandemic at TV producers' attempts to approximate the experiences TV viewers were used to. The dissimilarities between television (particularly live TV) and this pale imitation were striking. This moment also democratized video production in the sense that the production tools - lights, camera, set design - used by TV talk show hosts were ones readily available to regular folks. It familiarized more audiences with low/no-budget talk show production. As long as you were charismatic, good-looking, and had access to interview other charismatic, good-looking people, who cared what your background looked like, whether you were on a broadcast network, or whether or not you had a studio audience? 

I recently asked a student whether she listens to any podcasts, and after saying that she didn't, she mentioned that she was recently on a podcast (which made me wonder: what would it mean if more people were either guests or hosts of podcasts than actually listened to podcasts? Might the same have been true for blogs during their initial heyday?). At least she thought it was a podcast - she wasn't sure, because it was on YouTube and it was something you watched, not something you listened to. This should give any podcast researcher pause - make sure you understand how your study participants define the term "podcast."

I'd noticed that some of the podcasts I'd listened to on Spotify had added a video component. Of course, traditional news sources like The New York Times had been pushing reluctant writers in front of video cameras for years, since the early days of online video. The visual aspect didn't add much - it wasn't as if they edited together b-roll and interview footage, which would have meant recreating the traditional television news format on a different medium. It was just people talking - either to each other or to us. It seems to have been the rise of TikTok, Twitch streamers, and YouTube-as-first-screen among Gen-Z folks that prompted the more widespread integration of video into formerly audio or text content. Video was just a means by which to reach the large audiences already on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, not a means of adding much in terms of aesthetics or meaning.

During the pandemic boom in video streaming and podcasting, I recall realizing the importance of pre-production and editing (not live editing, as is used in sports broadcasts and other live events, but post-production editing) in the context of these shows. Those were the key separators between live streamers and podcasters, the qualities that made the former feel like an attempt to connect and converse with the audience and the latter feel like an attempt to entertain them, to put on a show. Then there were scripted podcasts like Serial or S-Town which resembled - in their production scale and in their feel - documentaries. Scripted non-fiction video podcasts - perhaps too short and informal to be called documentaries - are common, and as with their audio-only counterparts, they require more time to create than simple streaming content. Somewhere in between, you had podcasts like Freakonomics that edited scripted segments together with interview clips, something more like long-form journalism. 

But rather than written journalism, it's radio that is the obvious antecedent to podcasts. How different is the streamer directly addressing his audience for hours on end from Rush Limbaugh? How different is the group of friends joking around about news, entertainment, and one another's private lives from Howard Stern? Television talk shows - daytime and late-night - are another template. How different is an intimate podcast interview with a celebrity from Oprah? And how different might their effects be on individuals or societies?

Though there are plenty of similarities between talk radio, TV talk shows, and podcasts - enough to make scholarship on those cultural forms a must-read for anyone interested in the effects of podcasts - I can think of two important differences. The first concerns the number of podcasts - many more than were available through local or syndicated radio, through broadcast or cable TV. A lower barrier to entry means more entrants to the marketplace, and so the market for podcasts - in its scale and dynamics - is closer to the market for music: millions of creators, a few superstars, a really long tail. There might be less audience churn than with music, as audiences develop a para-social connection to podcasters and podcasts don't seem as evanescent as musical trends. 

As with any long-tail marketplace, it's a mistake to only study the distribution head (and I feel like a broken record for saying this again, but...) most listeners are not listening to whatever is trending. They're fragmented across the long tail. It's possible (even likely, I'd argue) that the thousands of niches served by millions of podcasts resemble niches served by magazines in the 20th century. Most of the niches and, collectively, most of the podcast audience consist of benign special interest content (think model train podcasts). But there's no way to know until we analyze the content along the long tail.

The size and diffuseness of the podcast market means that no single podcaster has the kind of reach that broadcasters had in the 20th century. Joe Rogan has something like 11 million listeners to each podcast while Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, in their heyday, had 20 million each, and that was at a time when the U.S. population was 2/3 the size, and a decent chunk of Rogan's listeners are from outside the U.S. It's worth dwelling on this point because it applies to many podcasters, streamers, and influencers. On the one hand, they have a global reach that broadcasters in the era of nationalized media markets could only dream of. But if we're trying to discern how much attention share they have (and I'd argue that attention share is a precondition to having influence), then you should be using the global population as your denominator, not the national population. In that case, no podcaster has more than 1% of the population's attention, and nearly all of them have less than .001% of it.

The second difference is regulation, or lack thereof. Howard Stern frequently butted heads with the FCC, and Rush Limbaugh had to placate the kinds of sponsors that would have likely steered clear of some of today's most popular podcasters. In the absence of FCC content regulation, edgy talk show hosts become edgier podcasters, moving their small-but-significant audiences closer to the fringes of society. Platforms regulate their content, too - creators can still get de-platformed - but it takes a lot more to get de-platformed than it took to get fined by the FCC. Meanwhile, provocateurs expand the Overton window.

But Rogan, like Stern (but perhaps not like Limbaugh), has to maintain some variety in order to maintain his large audience. Their critics tend to focus on particularly outlandish, offensive, or dangerous moments on their shows, but a quick survey of their output suggests that its not all like that, that they attempt to cater to multiple audiences. Don't like what you're hearing? Skip that episode and tune back in later. If we care about influence, we need to take into account how content varies by episode - not an impossible task so long as researchers can analyze podcast transcripts and look for keywords. 

Just as talk shows were spaces for discussion and commentary relating to social issues, political issues, and current events, so too are podcasts. Terms like "infotainment" and "soft news" can be applied to the category, though some podcasts - in format, production, and reception - are more clearly in the tradition of documentary filmmaking or journalism, and that's the genre of podcast that excites me the most. Documentaries continue to find audiences on streaming platforms, and there is no one type of documentary. It's a vibrant cultural form. Meanwhile, journalism continues its long quest for a business model to replace the one that produced a golden era of civic awareness that is swiftly receding into the past. There are a lot of people in the podcast "space" right now - audiences, creators, investors, platforms. But the medium hasn't reached maturity; it hasn't found its Orson Welles or its Dorothea Lange. For these reasons, if I were to place a bet on a means by which to tell a non-fiction story that had real impact, I'd bet on the podcast. 

Will the Revolution be Tweeted?

I just went to a terrific, timely talk by visiting professor Michael Dobbs on social media's role in revolutions. It was a rare treat to be in a room with well-informed experts on media and politics and discuss something that was going on right at that moment. Dobbs gave many examples of the popular press claiming that social media, Twitter in particular, had precipitated the successful revolution in Tunisia and the still-in-progress revolution in Egypt. He brought up examples of techno-utopian views on the subject (e.g. Clay Shirky's TED talk on the revolutionary power of Twitter) as well as rebuttals such as Malcolm Gladwell's piece for the New Yorker.

One question that came to mind during his talk was: when assessing whether or not Twitter and social media are capable of facilitating revolutions, to what are comparing them? And by "we," I mean the users, the public, the press, the critics, anybody. Gladwell essentially compares Twitter and Facebook groups to real world activism. I think he does this because he believes (as do I) that a fair amount of social media activists think of their tweeting or Facebook-group-founding as more similar to participation in a protest than sitting at home passively in front of a television screen and watching it all unfold. They think they're being active, but Gladwell points out that they ultimately have little real power because, unlike civil rights protesters or other activists who actually changed our world, they are not making any real sacrifice; they are not risking much; they are not forming lasting bonds with people for whom they would make some real sacrifice (e.g. a large sum of money, risking one's life, etc). So that, Gladwell says is the key difference between real world protesters and virtual ones: shared sacrifice.

I basically think of online activism the way i think about online "friends": instead of just saying, "online _____ is no substitute for the real thing!", I think it presents us an opportunity to pull apart the real world phenomenon and ask what parts of it are duplicated by the online proxy, what parts of it aren't, and how those parts matter for outcomes of interest. So, what is the point of protesting?

First, its a way to devalue the ruling party's monopoly on physical force. If enough people get out there in the town square and don't back down after being physically threatened and assaulted, then the power to threaten and assault loses its meaning. There's also a "softer" power of protesting crowds: they can choose not to vote for someone, they can choose not to spend their money somewhere. Even if they don't live in a democracy, they can make it even more glaringly apparent to the outside world that they're living in a country that isn't even remotely democratic. Dobbs seemed skeptical that this could result in the overthrow of a repressive regime. It didn't work in Poland, it didn't work in Iran, and it probably wouldn't work here, not unless people make very real, significant sacrifices, ones that couldn't be done online.

Dobbs essentially said that Twitter is a way to share information. Like pamphlets distributed in other revolutions, they are a necessary but not sufficient criteria for revolution. Other things need to be in place: long-standing, easy-to-grasp grievances, for one. But I don't think social media is just a way to get information out. The difference has to do with social pressure. Television was and is quite good at presenting the spectacle of many people behaving a certain way. Combine this spectacle with many little nodes on a network behaving or expressing ideas in the same way and you've got the appearance of consensus, which is a powerful tool.

This gets me to the idea of a tipping point. There is a point at which the contagion of an idea rapidly speeds up, a point at which it seems like "everybody" is buying the same t-shirt or saying the same catch-phrase or using Facebook. These are all fairly benign trends, which makes sense. Buying a certain kind of t-shirt didn't involve much sacrifice: they're all pretty much the same to you, and if this one is popular, even if its a little more expensive, maybe you should buy it. Putting your life on the line or uprooting your family or risking your livelihood (all things that may be called for if you're participating in a revolution) involve significant risk. But those arguing against the revolutionary power of social media miss a key point: social pressure can convince you to make great sacrifices under the right circumstances.

Here's how I think it works. At the start, you need to have a group of people who are very similar to you, the Twitter user, and they have to be engaging in some activity that you were pretty close to doing. Then you might be convinced to do what they're doing. As the number of people doing that thing grows, it starts to matter less and less how similar those people are to you and how predisposed you were to act that way in the first place. When it comes to social pressure, there is an effect of sheer numbers. It doesn't replace or cancel out those other effects, but as the number grows, the effects of similarity and pre-disposition lessen. If you give people who want a revolution a sense that they can pull it off because there are so many other young, unemployed, pissed-off men who are ready to risk jail or a beating, then its more likely to happen than if you didn't give them that sense. This is something that pamphlets or television alone cannot do.

At the end of Dobbs talk, another professor pointed out how many billions of tourist dollars Egypt is losing each day. China's economy can withstand a repressive government, but it doesn't look like this one can. We'll just have to wait and see.

The Medium is the Message: Blog

Reading this recent article in the New Yorker on blog magnate Nick Denton prompted me to revisit McLuhan's adage that the medium is the message. I do not take this phrase to mean that content has no significant effect beyond the medium by which it is accessed, but rather that the medium can influence what content people end up choosing and thus alter the media experience. I also take "medium" not to mean all internet applications but to mean various websites or applications that allow users access to information in unique ways.

Denton's blog empire, which includes Gawker, Gizmodo, and Deadspin, feature a subtle but important tweak to the standard blog format (eloquently encapsulated by Ben McGrath as "links with commentary, presented in reverse chronological order"): it presents statistics on how many people have read and commented on each article. Denton also pays his writers based on the amount of readers their articles garner. There is a kind of herd mentality in readers: they read what is popular, and the more they do this, the more popular those particular articles become. It is worth asking whether the content preferred in this system is different from a system where writers and editors take it upon themselves to design the format and layout of an online publication (as is the case with traditional blogs and online news sites like NYTimes). In the New Yorker article, there seems to be agreement among journalists on both sides of the traditionalist/new wave divide that such a format leads to more "sensational" news preference.

This way of presenting news seems somehow more democratic than traditional editor-selected alternatives. It sounds as though it provides more choice, and that would be better, wouldn't it? In a way, Gawker's innovation is similar to what Google or Reddit or Digg do: they take tons of raw information and they privilege the most popular links. That judgment as to what is worthwhile is made very quickly by users. They scan headlines and if the headline is interesting enough, they click on it. The assumption that this is somehow good rests on some other fundamental assumptions worth questioning:

• We are being held back by gatekeepers (editors) from what we really want. We are used to having the type of content or experiences we have access to being controlled by gatekeepers who may not have our best interests at heart. As long as we can choose for our "selves", we'll be fine. This is, in turn, based on another assumption
  
• As individuals, we are single, desiring, decision-making selves with stable, unique sets of desires.
  

Returning to the "medium is the message" mantra, we could consider the difference between the concerns over television and the concerns over the internet. The case against television was always a case against content. Watching television was bad because most of what was on television was so bad. By contrast, the case against the internet is a case against its users. There are wonderful, amazing, informative, pro-social, productive things one can do on the internet: create and run a business or a charity, disseminate useful, accurate information, take a course online. If people fail to do these things, its not because there is any lack of positive options from which to choose, so it must be their fault.

Denton gives people what they want, and its not the caliber of people that he's polling that leads to the move away from hard news toward gossip. Its the fact that he's accessing our inner hedonists, our immediate selves.