Podcasting and Political Life

Abstract

In this article, the author considers “podcasting” in relation to the work of McLuhan and other medium theorists. He then looks at the growing popularity of this new media form as another possible manifestation of Walter Ong’s secondary orality. In the tradition of the town crier, the beat poet, the DJ, and most recently, the blogger, podcasting recasts the personal experience (the “phenomenological feel”) as well as the actual perspectives and preferences accessible to people on the fly via digital storage and playback of audio content. Podcasting certainly seems to blur notions of “public” and “private” in unprecedented ways, and a recent concept dubbed “publicy” (privacy that occurs under the intense acceleration of instantaneous communications) accounts for this. Although the podcast may be the latest and perhaps purest form of publicy, is publicy itself really anything new, or is it just a new form of orality (i.e., secondary orality) that recasts all as witness-participants to the chants and decrees of the iconoclast, village elder, and cultural mystic? The author argues that podcast consumption, itself the product of complex cognitive and cultural processes, is consequential to its reconfigurations of everyday experiences and the personal and political significances bound up in them.