podcasting is one of those inventions that makes me thankful for technology. this is exactly what technology is supposed to do for us: bring together people from all over to share their views on just about everything with no mediating forces to stop them from doing so. the fact that so much of what is on our airwaves is brought to us by the good people at Clear Channel Communications means that most everything we hear on the radio is profit related. Curtis Fox, in his review of podcasting, mentions the real world constraints of being a cog in the corporate radio machine: padding a show to fill the prescribed segment of time, breaking for messages from your sponsors, affording the massively expensive airtime, etc. podcasting makes these concerns obsolete and, best of all, anyone can do it. i don't know what the average hourly rate is for time on an FM frequency is, but i can't imagine it's something a housewife or college student could afford.
what may be even more significant than the democratization of the medium is the fact that, in podcast form, amateur broadcasters don't have big brother breathing down their neck. the FCC does not police the podosphere...and thank god for that. it's enough that corporations decide what messages i should be bombarded with, having the federal government decide what isn't appropriate for me to hear is beyond frustrating.
popular commercial radio may remind me that its got "more music, less commercials, every hour" than its competitors, but i still feel like i'm being sold something every minute. and public radio may have the content i like (relatively free from corporate brainwashing), but it's not radical by any stretch of the imagination. i just can't win here.
but i believe podcasting can be a real success through its free and diverse content. my only concern is, as podcasting's popularity increases will there be better way to promote and organize all of the offerings out there? efforts like story corp's are a good framework for cataloging personal oral histories, but will places like the paley center for media (which is the brains behind nyc's museum of television and radio) organize large scale efforts for recording our oral history on the web?
It may be good that there are no regulations when it comes to podcasting, but think to yourself: is it really good? What happens to people when there's no supervision, no higher power to answer to? Most people have an innate sense of what's good and what's not appropriate, but not everyone does, and for those few who can't control themselves, this can lead to big problems. Parents will become very protective of their chilren to prevent them from being damaged by thoughtless or even intentional adults who want to hurt children. Everything needs moderation; it just has to be done in a way that's not too domineering.
ReplyDeleteTo your point about organizing and promoting podcasts, I think DRM & Apple's stranglehold on mp3 culture (via its iPod and via the iTunes store) also plays a role in where and how podcasts are discoverable. There are other places to go to get podcasts, but once you get them, you have to manage what's on your listening device, which, it seems, is more likely to be an iPod than anything else, in which case, because of DRM, you can *only* use iTunes to manage your podcasts and music on your iPod.
ReplyDeleteI think this also touches on Chana's point above. How are we curating and presenting groups of podcasts? Is there a site that recommends age-appropriate podcasts? That could be a very helpful section on some library's website, I think.
You also bring up some really good questions about how/if these media artifacts are being preserved, or ever will. I hadn't even thought of that! Maybe the Internet Archive is thinking about this?