Podcast: The Tivo-Time-shifting-Radio-Ipod

Everytime I open my itunes, I notice that little purple microphone icon emitting radio waves . Podcasts, it reads.

What on earth is a podcast?!? I truthfully didn’t know the definition of this little purple icon that always sat innocently in between Tv Shows and Audiobooks until tonight. A podcast is like the radio version of tivo. “A podcaster records something–anything from music to philosophical ramblings, professional news or snorting noises–into a computer with the air of a microphone, then posts this audio file onto the internet” (The Economist). And from the internet, people across the globe “subscribe” to this persons “show” and it is automatically downloaded to their ipod. What appeals listeners to such a media? “Heard on the Street”, an article from The Economist says the appeal is composed of three aspects:

1. Listeners can mix the music and talk feeds that they want.

2. Podcasts are free of the endless advertising on radio stations that keep listeners switching from station to station in frustration.

3. Podcasts have a “time-shifting” component (this is where the Tivo aspect comes in), since they can listen to the podcast whenever and where ever they chose.

Will Apple’s Podcasts change society the way the Ipod has? The Ipod changed the music business in “not only the means of distribution but even the strategies people would use to buy songs. No one envisioned subway cars and airplane cabins and street corners and school lounges and fitness centers where cast swathes of humanity would separate themselves from the bonds of reality via the White Earbud Express” (Levy 359). In writer Steven Levy’s article “The Perfect Thing”, he says that the podcast may become the radio of the twenty-first century.

I downloaded  the audio comedy  podcast by John Hodgman called “Today In the Past”. (Image of Hodgman on left.) The short posts range from 20 seconds to a few minutes and there is a post for each day containing a fake fact about that date in the past. The specific podcasting experience was a lot like listening to a comedic audiobook. This one podcast had only one speaker, John Hodgman, which can differ from the radio when there are anywhere from two to four people talking. It was not conversational like the radio might be and included no type of commercials but was intimate knowing that Hodgman was simply speaking into a microphone. It constitutes new media in that it is an evolved version of previously existing medias, combining the Tivo time-shifting option, the radio, and the Ipod all into one.

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