Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book:

* One of the signature tropes in podcasting is the centrality of the host, as a character in their own right. Radio presenters have historically been popular figures with dedicated followings, but podcast hosts do not have to abide by the proprieties of broadcasting – they can reveal themselves as real people, with foibles, fears, strengths and weaknesses. Even the term podcast ‘host’ versus radio ‘presenter’ is a giveaway. A host is someone who invites you to their home, or some personal part of their life; a ‘presenter’ is a professional communicator.

* Pre – podcasting, a radio documentary presenter would normally stick closely to the topic in question, with tightly honed narration flowing into interview excerpts or layered over relevant sounds. But in a narrative podcast, where show duration is not a constraint, there is room for meta – scenes that allow listeners to peek into the host’s life and ‘witness’ the production procedure.

* “In radio, everything is held within the confines of the broadcasting clock. Ideas are explored in blocks of 15, 30, 45 minutes precisely. But in podcasting time is fluid, unconstrained. On Field Recordings , for example, episodes range from 30 seconds to 54 minutes long – the space expanding or contracting as the idea demands. When I’m editing for radio I can almost sense the timings in my body without looking as I pace something out, knowing what that duration feels like, thinking about how to hold the feeling whilst expanding or contracting work to fit the parameters of the time frame.”

* Audio has always been the most intimate of mediums. It’s a lot to do with the connecting power of voice, which allows us to hear so much more than words. We can detect how someone feels as well as what they say: their tone, their timbre, their delivery all provide clues that help us develop a sense of who is speaking. Accent can build character, as can idiom and rhythm: all provide sensory information that is missing on the page.
Sound adds its own magic: it’s porous and enveloping. You don’t have ‘earlids’ that can switch it off, as the Canadian composer R Murray Schafer points out. He memorably wrote that ‘hearing is a way of touching at a distance’.

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book:

* “the written word, while very stimulating, does not have the same level of immediacy as the spoken word. It’s not nearly as intimate.”

* podcasting is more intimate than reading because the host’s thoughts mingle with her own, but also comments the temporal “immediacy” of her experience and associates it with oral/aural culture (“Whisper in my ear”).

* podcasts communicate in a way that causes listeners to feel something. In triggering feelings consistently associated with intimacy, and sometimes even specifically stating that those feelings are intimate…

* Linda Williams locates similar emotional responses within the body. Speaking of pornography, horror, and melodrama, she writes that “what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female”

* “Obviously, write a good story, but my experience with podcasts is that I love you, the speaker, way more than I love your story.” For Cranor, an intimate podcast relies on a loving relationship, not on a linearly unfolding narrative.

* Within podcasting research, the medium is often heralded as distinct from radio because listeners presumably pay closer attention. Bottomley repeats ideas from the podcast industry when he writes that, for podcasts, “listeners have presumably sought out the program and they will consume the story linearly from beginning to end. That is, listeners will not be randomly tuning in to the middle of the story, as is common with broadcast radio” (Bottomely 213). Listeners pay attention, the story goes, because they seek out the content they want. Their attention connects to their detailed listening, from beginning to end.

* “what distinguishes radio from TV is the intimacy. What distinguishes a podcast from radio is that it’s intimacy plus, because you’ve chosen it and it’s literally in your ears”

* When Reddit user ThatRedheadDude could not record with his co – host anymore, he asked how to make his podcast. It is perhaps no surprise that the top – rated piece of advice given to him was:
Talk to your audience. Engage with them. If you know what you’re talking about, you’ll have plenty to say. Take notes beforehand for an outline of topics to go over. But mostly just talk like you would if you were having a conversation with your listeners. That’s what they want to hear anyway.

* The television host “faces the spectator, uses the mode of direct address, talks as if he were conversing personally and privately” (Horton and Wohl). There is also a strong tradition of speaking directly to listeners in radio. Shingler and Wieringa point to BBC radio trainer Elwyn Evans’ 1977 Radio: A Guide to Broadcasting Technique ’s advice that “the audience to be aimed at is an audience of one (infinitely repeated)” as how broadcasters can “achieve intimacy and a sense of reciprocity” (115). Like radio, the friendly conversationality of podcasts is here focused on the individual listener, and is inseparable from how podcasting creates community.

* “Podcasting is a peculiarly intimate medium. Usually transmitted through headphones to a solitary listener, or played over the car stereo during a commute, an audio narrative can be immersive in a way that a radio playing in the background in a kitchen rarely is. Podcasts are designed to take up time, rather than to be checked, scanned, and rushed through: they are for those moments when you can’t be scrolling on your phone. For a digital medium, podcasts are unusual in their commitment to a slow build, and to a sensual atmosphere.”

* What does it mean to be close to someone? How is it possible to be close through media? In describing itself as intimate, podcasting communicates a desire for closeness in time and space. The listeners, hosts, producers, critics — all of the people who are part of podcasting’s medial network — who embrace intimacy are telling each other: this is what it means to be close and connected through media, this is me trying to be close to you. These descriptions, these attempts to create connection, form a code through which to understand and interpret individual experiences within podcasting. This code builds on historical forms of intimacy, including allusions to family, friends, and romantic partners, and reworks them to describe the relationships formed by media. Sometimes these allusions take the form of specific references to people or spaces like the home and sometimes they reference the types of interaction, as they do in speaking of reciprocity. The entire time, though, intimacy and the language connected to intimacy negotiate how podcasting communicates and, in so doing, forms close communities through the intimate connections it describes.
To be intimate can mean to be close in space. “Touching Podcasts” reflects on that closeness and the ways in which both Media Studies and popular descriptions of podcasting consider the haptics of sound. As sound moves the body, it carries with it a certain affectivity. Following Richard Grusin and others, feelings are felt within the body and media can create a physical response.