Abstract
Popular science sphere of communication is acquiring new features of virtuality, globality, mosaic structure and social orientation, which are essential in fulfilling its functions in modern society. Based on the examination of 92 podcasts, the study deals with podcasting research identifying typical characteristics of the podcast and factors contributing to the spread of podcasting in the popular scientific hypermedia communication. The survey showed that increasing popularity of the podcast in the popular scientific sphere is explained by several factors. First, informing the user becomes more accessible, quicker and easier. Secondly, the listener takes part in interpersonal communication not with a virtual author, but with a real person, gets the opportunity to make his own conclusions based on sounding speech, which is more expressive, emotional, and has a strong impact on the addressee. Thirdly, most podcasts are interviews and discussions, which facilitates the perception and processing of new information making it more structured by means of questions, paraphrasing, exemplification, clarifications, etc. Analysis of the Nature publication podcast helped single out structural features that allow a podcast to function in a hypermedia environment as an independent multimodal node. The conclusions about the emergence of new virtual environment for intercultural interaction and cooperation were made.
Highlights
Scientific and popular sphere of communication is rapidly developing and gaining new features - virtuality, globality, mosaic, social orientation
Based on the examination of 92 podcasts, the study deals with podcasting research identifying typical characteristics of the podcast and factors contributing to the spread of podcasting in the popular scientific hypermedia communication
The analysis proved that the increasing prevalence of podcast in the popular science sphere is explained by a num‐ ber of factors:
Summary
Scientific and popular sphere of communication is rapidly developing and gaining new features - virtuality, globality, mosaic, social orientation. Non-profit organizations and foundations that publish popular science magazines, books, Internet sites, television channels set global goals for the organization of the entire world community to address the interdisciplinary world problems related to environmental protection, the develop‐ ment of education, the protection of human rights, the in‐ tensification of medical research, etc These are the aims of a number of projects, information, financial, scientific and technical support of which is provided by the scientific com‐ munity as well as government agencies. “From the point of view of users, standardization and dy‐ namics are important because they can subscribe to any number of RSS-channels that publish materials on topics of interest to these users at different intervals Standardization makes it possible to combine (syndicate) different sources, whereas dynamics contributes to the development of selected topics over time” (Stupina, 2007:4-5). In connection with direct and indirect references to the context, and explicitly - each block is a polylogue among several speakers, each reply is addressed to the listeners making them direct participants of the communication (Stupina, 2007; King & Gura, 2009; Gürsul & Canim, 2013)
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