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.
