Ep. 55 - The Social Science of Podcasts with Jason Loviglio

12:49PM Apr 22, 2024

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Jean Kim

Dr. Jason Loviglio

Keywords:

podcasting

media

talking

umbc

radio

ways

social science

production

production assistant

content

patton

internet

niche

social sciences

process

culture

early

rss feed

marshall mcluhan

folks

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC.

On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

Marshall McLuhan once famously wrote that 'the medium is the message.' Well, given that you're currently listening to a podcast, a relatively unique form of media, perhaps the medium and therefore the message deserves some further scrutiny. You know, I've been putting this podcast together since the darkest days of the COVID 19 pandemic. And for full disclosure, I didn't do it just out of the kindness of my own heart, or the desire to bring the social sciences to the masses. I did it in part because I was stuck in my basement all day. And I was missing out on the chance to interact with my impressive colleagues the way I get to do during more normal times on our campus. But beyond that, I started a podcast because like many millennials, I really, really like podcasts.

But how does scholars think about podcasts, their content, their place in the media environment, their relationship with more long standing media like radio, their effects on listeners and society? It turns out a podcast about the social sciences can get really, really meta, because today I'm delighted to bring you my recent conversation with Dr. Jason Levy, Leo, Associate Professor and share in the UMBC department of Media and Communication Studies. Dr. Livigno is a scholar of media history, radio and podcasting studies. And with me Lindgren of the University of Tasmania. He is CO editor of the Routledge companion to radio and podcasting studies, the first issue of which came out in 2022. More recently, Dr. Lophelia has published an article entitled from radio to podcasting, intimacy and massification. He expands on these ideas and our Social Science Podcast conversation on the social science of podcasting, which I'm delighted to bring you right now.

All right, today, we're beginning our meta podcasting episode. I'm really delighted to welcome Dr. Jason Loviglio to the podcast. Dr. Loviglio, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.

It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. So I want to jump right in. This is obviously something of a fun episode for me just given that I've done podcasting now for a couple of years in this capacity, and I finally get to talk to an expert on podcasting. So I've got a lot of questions for you. And I really hope that you'll be able to tell us a bit about the field of podcasting as a medium, and also the disciplinary approaches to podcasting. And so, the first thing that I wanted to ask is about sort of the history of technology and the fact that podcasting is relatively new. So, obviously, radio, audio recording, you know, finals, grammar phones, these kinds of things have been with us for a very long time, you know, since before the airplane, that kind of thing. The podcasting is a pretty new medium as far as it goes. And so I wanted to ask you about kind of the scholarly perspective on how this medium of podcasting might be different from other media. Is podcasting different in some way? And how is that?

Yeah, I, I struggle around all origin stories of of media and of course, I teach a course on the history of communication media in MCs. So there's always a desire to pinpoint a particular eureka moment, particularly around a technological and innovation or discovery that produces the conditions for a new medium to rise. And it's almost always much more complicated than involves a tremendous gathering of social and historical forces, often accidental collisions, of different things. And then of course, there's the the Marshall McLuhan insight that you know, the, the content of any new medium is always some older medium, right. So the content of early television was radio shows that just added cameras, a lot of the top talent from the 1940s radio became the the first folks to get TV shows. So, one confronts an infinite regress when trying to figure out when any particular medium began even so, I understand the curiosity about the specifics that may have made podcasting as we know it possible. And there are some dates I think the most common moments that can be pointed to our our technical the the creation of an RSS feed, which is can be dated to 2003, a guy named Dave Winer created the first RSS podcast feed and RSS stands for depending on who you're talking to different things a really simple syndication is the most common understanding of what the term means. But it's also been understood to mean RDF Site Summary. So the the thing that makes maybe podcasting unique from earlier, technologies that may have existed before 2003, like radio, or like other forms of digital audio, was the RSS feed, which enables people to subscribe directly to a podcaster. And for podcasters, to share things that are automatically then pushed out to a subscribers.

Yeah, so that's fascinating. And I really appreciate the Marshall McLuhan kind of idea that sort of embedded in podcasting are the histories of these other media. It's, it's it's very true, I think, and just reflecting on some of the ways that I have characterized the production process of this podcast, certainly there are radio analogs that I've thought about when putting this together for for better or worse, right. But you're right, also that the way that listeners are consuming this content is a lot different than if you're just tuning tuning the dial. And I mean, do you think that that has consequences for the way that we think the way that we learn the way that we ingest information, the fact that we're subscribing that we were able to pick and choose, then to some extent, it sort of speaks to the devolution of the media space more generally, right, with the kind of ala carte Isaiah, and if you will, of media? So I guess the question is, are audiences ultimately experiencing something different from the podcast space relative to other audio media? Yeah,

I think that's a really good point, people who maybe bristle a little bit of the concept that maybe radio is more continuous with podcasting, and that, in fact, podcasting is simply radios next phase, they really point to the ways in which you can locate the roots of a lot of podcast technology and a lot of podcast, production practice, and indeed, a lot of podcasts, reception practices in the internet culture of the 90s and early 2000s. And particularly around the idea of, of the blog, or the individual publisher, right. So when you think of the DIY ethos of early Internet communities, and the sort of opt in niche model of a lot of online lists, listserv, blogs, these spaces, podcasting actually takes up a lot of the qualities with early internet participatory cultures, going back to the 70s versus the bass scale, highly capitalized, one to many signal that we associate with broadcast radio.

That's, that's really fascinating to think about. And I really liked that because, you know, I think about myself as somebody of a specific generation where I really grew up kind of as the internet really became fully fledged in some ways, I'm kind of the the test case that sort of a guinea pig, as it were, as it were, with the advent of social media and that kind of thing. That's kind of a, you know, not an early millennial, but a early early to middle millennial, you might say. So, you know, I always tell students that my high school graduating class was the first to get the Facebook because before that it was only available to college students. And so it was the first time that high school students can have access to it. So we were the first to be exposed to this new mode of communication. But similarly, right, I remember having a Live Journal, you know, blogging was a really big part of my, my teenage years. And it's interesting to think that for me, podcasting seems like this very essential part of my media diet, you know, obviously, given that I'm also making one I wonder if maybe that's that's part of this kind of evolutionary arc of of media and internet kind of, you know, like you're saying production from the individual user or the kind of the blogosphere that's that's really fascinating. But you know, obviously today podcasts are widely consumed, not just by Elder millennials, that is right by folks kind of across the age spectrum demographic. Can you tell us about this market for podcasts is this you know, our podcasts the the biggest thing in the world are there is this still kind of a tiny niche subset of the world are in what's the story?

It's a great question is in some ways it is the question that has animated so much discourse around podcasting. A colleague of mine, Neil Verma is coming out imminently with a book on podcasting, where he sort of tries to draw a line under the, what he calls the proleptic approach to podcasting, as it's being talked about as the next big thing. He says it's been 10 years of talking about podcasting as something that is in the process of becoming what it's going to be, which he argues, is proven to be a barrier to thinking about historically, and he's making the case that it's now has 20 years of history that we can we can begin to talk about it as it is. And so the question of Is it a? Is it the next big thing? Or is it a niche thing? Right? I mean, we can, we can see the ways in which it is both, we can also see the ways in which it is now something essentially, utterly different from the technical definition that I started the history with, right? The RSS feed in the land of pay walled enclosure word, platforms, like Spotify no longer really defines what a podcast is, you simply do not need an RSS feed to access the Joe Rogan show for better or worse, right. So that's the trouble with defining a cultural form through technological means the cultural form evolves, and so do the technological means of accessing it. So it's now no longer tied to the RSS feed. It is tied to a bunch of other industrial practices. And at the same time, it has become massively capitalized in a way that makes it far more similar to the broadcast production logics of the 20th century television radio, then to the DIY Podcast culture that began in the early aughts.

Wow, yeah, that's, that's really blowing my mind, especially as I reflect, kind of as you're talking about this, about the broader internet culture, similar trends may be occurring there as well, right, where the, the internet used to be a lot of different websites. And to some extent, it feels like as a user, that the internet is like five websites, essentially, and, and are really, to some extent, just a collection of apps now, that are, you know, highly vertical and advertised. And, you know, these are kind of the only options that we have to be able to obtain kind of the large scale content that we demand. So yeah, that's, that's amazing to think about podcasting as kind of having this historical arc towards. Yeah, like verticality, to some extent. And, you know, I reflect on you know, we were talking about this example of, of Joe Rogan, the the top, what, 2100 podcasts by subscribers in the world, it's, it's a list that is a little bit unexpected. To some extent, it's not exactly always the players that you expect it to be. Do you have any insights into that list? Kind of, you know, I think about the like long tail, you know, of content on the internet, the idea that we've got a few kind of big things, you know, in the realm of television, like everybody watched Game of Thrones, everybody watched, you know, one of these things, but then there's 1000 shows that have small audiences, right? Is the podcast space can be characterized in that way? Do we have a couple of big podcasts and a million tiny ones?

Yeah, part of that is a very much a moving target. And so people speak often less in terms of, of individual shows and specific platforms, which have figured out how to monetize the shows the content, not only through advertising, but also through the data mining, of the listening habits of the people who are on those platforms like Spotify, right, the real Goldmine, there is in the ways in which listening data can be aggregated and then monetized and sold. So the industrial model is changing and developing. But back to the previous question. I think when we we often tend to think of the 20th century was the era of the mass medium, and the 21st century is the era of niche or micro or algorithmically curated media that makes the kind of news feed that you're going to see a different than mine based on on previous behavior. And I think it's important to think of massification and niche suffocation is to sort of interdependent impulses in a advanced capitalist medium market, such that they're always massification vertical integration capitalization, Inc. closures of the common type activities happening. And there's always fresh green shoots of creativity, and new under explored neighborhoods of community that people create, and that draw new interest and new communities of creativity. And, you know, inevitably, capital falls behind and industry realizes it and rationalizes it to the point where, you know, the process becomes very similar to what Cory Doctorow called in should ification in his lovely essay about tick tock, we can see the shit ification of Google as a search engine. Now it is just in in my very recent memory, I can remember it being a far more useful tool for me. And now, it seems like it is serving me ads rather than search results. So we can see this process happening again and again, across internet media cultures and production industries. Well,

yeah, I really love Dr. Joe's idea of Vinci edification, because I do see it everywhere. As much as I try not to, I try to maintain a more optimistic take sometimes, but yeah, you're right, that when I when I goes to Google something and I get served ads, or when, you know, I tried to purchase a product online, and it's impossible to tell what hasn't been, you know, paid for to appear in front of my eyes, before other other product options. It's a very difficult thing to deal with. And, you know, also thinking as a political scientist, I also wonder about the evolution of podcasting and its effect on our society. Do you think that this kind of long tail distribution of content is potentially dangerous from the perspective of public opinion or of falsehoods? misinformation?

Yeah, that's a that's a great question. And I mean, it's a question I think, that joins our disciplines, right. We and it's not the first time that we've talked about the relationship between media journalism, and a politically informed public, on which all democratic theory rests, right as a foundation, right. So, you know, we're engaged in in a joint process of wanting to maximize the usefulness and the efficacy of the medium of education information in order to protect a democratic public space in which democratic activity can can wrestle with a more powerful forces that are that are not as democratic. So I think when thinking about podcasting in regards to these issues, that it's important not to think of it as an isolation from the broader media culture, particularly the other places that we have come to think of as, as repositories for public discourse, like Twitter, or x, and other social media spaces and the ways in which the traditional print journalism field has now fully integrated with digital networks and with digital first kinds of information service and the ways in which actual journalism is now being fed upon and regurgitated and reformatted by a secondary intermediaries for profit in ways that are worrisome both from a sense of well how does this business model and, and also worrisome for the ways in which it creates these echo chambers in which only certain kinds of stories get told or served to certain kinds of users of any any algorithmically determined media feed, which includes podcasting. But I mean, I think it's important not to, not to neglect the fact that you and I are talking right now on a podcast that has the the features of the very earliest kinds of, you know, internet community culture of DIY, and you know, low overhead and, you know, really divorced from the, the profit motive, and really, not being underwritten by any commercial interests, but really organized around the interests of the podcaster and the podcasters understanding of his or her audience. So, you know, we continue to have this, and that is not nothing. And the way in which it is often talked about as being nothing has to do with analytics and listeners and subscriptions. And these are, you know, I'm guessing in small compared to what Joe Rogan is pulling, but maybe that's the wrong way to look at it, right. Maybe we don't look at it in terms of the number of listeners We look at it in terms of the number of people who feel empowered to take to the microphone, the number of people who feel seen and heard when when they're asked to talk to you, right. And maybe that is where we can sort of recuperate, more optimistic way of thinking about what it is that we call podcasting.

I gotta say, Dr. Loviglio, I'm really glad to hear that, at least in your expert opinion, doing something like this is a way to push back against some of these broader trends across media that might be worrying to us from the perspective of democratic theory or from the perspective of media production. And in a way, what you're saying, and not only it's very heartening to me, it's also an incredibly great segue to our next question, which is a question that I'm really excited to be able to ask of you. And that is, because most of the time when I'm doing the podcast, I'll ask folks to tell us a bit of advice for students who might be listening to the podcast, about, you know, maybe how they could sharpen their social science skills, that kind of thing. But obviously, with your career with your interests, you have a lot of expertise, not only in the social sciences, but also in the actual media production space. And so I wanted to ask you, if you might have any advice for students who might be interested in doing exactly the thing it is that you're describing here, taking to the microphone pluralizing the discourse as it were, even through these sort of micro efforts to to broaden the discussion. So if folks wanted to get involved in podcasting, what are some of the things they can do to have a successful experience?

That's a it's a really good question. And I think, probably, you, you teach this as well in political science. But in MCs, we're really interested in focusing on portable skills, skills of critical thinking and clarity in an organization of written verbal and digital composition that can really be portable, across domains, from the classroom, to the workplace, and also, from whatever happens to be the hot media technology of the moment, to the inevitable innovations that are going to shake and rock and disrupt whatever industry is currently hiring, so we don't really want students to, to major in getting a job doing 2024 technology, we want them to major in, you know how to communicate clearly on lots of platforms. And for those folks who are interested in any aspect of audio work or sound work, I would say just get really comfortable with the work of editing. And I say that editing a paper and editing a video and editing an audio file have a lot of similarities, but they also have their own peculiarities. And I know that you probably learned on the job, a lot of what makes a sound based product distinct. There are aesthetic and technical considerations. But there are also narrative and thematic ones as well, I guess I would tell students who are really interested in podcasting, to get comfortable with the recording app that they have on their smartphone, if they have a smartphone. And to really begin there and then get really comfortable with any off the shelf free consumer grade audio editing software, I have some friends who've won Podcast Awards, who use the the same video editing software that they first learned when they first got a Mac, to do their audio work. Because that's the first one they learned and they're fluent in the editing language of that interface, and really to become comfortable thinking sonically thinking about how things sound, being aware that the room that I'm in has a tone. It is not quiet when I'm not talking and to record some of that tone. Because that's critical for entity, and then to be comfortable in figuring out how to get other people to talk to you. And that that is a skill that will be very portable, across a great number of domains professional as well. It's personal. The only thing I didn't mention I wanted to mention is, um, a lot of young people when they hear podcasts, they think of YouTube. The other thing about a podcast is it was sort of 2005 because it was understood to be an audio only thing and it's evolved into other kinds of conversations that are neither audio only, nor RSS. So, a friend of mine mentioned And then, you know, maybe podcasting is a feeling rather than a technological set of technological standards or protocols. I think that that's important.

I think that's great. Yeah, maybe podcasting is a feeling. I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I'm really so grateful for the insights that you offer us about the history of podcasting about where it might be going about some worrying trends, perhaps some ways to push back against those trends through our own agency and through our own interests in production. Really, this is a fantastic conversation. And I just wanted to thank you again so much for for being with us today.

Now it's time for Campus Connections, the part of the podcast where we connect today's content to other work happening at UMBC. After a restful spring break, our production assistant Jean is back. Tell us about some related work happening in the realm of Media Studies at UMBC. Take it away Jean.

Hi, Dr. Anson, thank you so much. In today's episode, we are going to look at a recently published book from Professor Elizabeth Patton, associate professor of Media and Communication Studies here at UMBC. Entitled easy living the rise of the home office, Dr. Patton's book examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated in popular culture through mass media during the 20th century. She analyzes national magazines, newspapers, TV, film and marketing material to show the normalization of remote work portrayed in media. With the changes in what it means to work in the home. Dr. Patton challenges the notion of the home as solely a private sphere, revealing its intricate connections to the public sphere through social meaning and market value. This discussion resonates particularly well because as you mentioned earlier, in the episode, Dr. Anson, retrieving the social sciences kind of all started when you were working at home. It's really interesting to think about what insights Dr. Patton's book might offer on the social dynamics and social science that has facilitated the emergence of this podcast. And that's it for today's Campus Connection.

Thanks so much Jean. The medium may be the message but the message can only be received if awesome production assistants work around the clock to make the medium. That's all for today's episode. Until next time, keep listening to your local low budget podcasts. And as always, keep questioning.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our undergraduate production assistant is Jean Kim. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialsciences@umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 sponsored events. Until next time, keep questioning.