"I’ll admit that I have occasionally been gripped by false memories as a result of podcasts — been briefly sure that I’d seen a TV show I’d never watched, or convinced that it was a friend, not a professional producer, who told me some great anecdote. But on the whole, my concern is less that I am being brainwashed and more that I’m indulging in something deeply avoidant: filling my head with ideas without actually having to do the messy, repetitive, boring, or anxious work of making meaning for myself. It’s like downloading a prefabbed stream of consciousness and then insisting it’s DIY. The effect is twofold: a podcast distracts me from the tedium of being alone with myself, while also convincingly building a rich, highly-produced version of my inner life."
(Suzannah Showler, 2019)
I often listen to podcasts late at night, eyes closed, lying in my bed, in total darkness. Podcasts are fairy tales - or even lullabies - for grown ups. They merge with your dreams, becoming building blocks of the subconscious. Showler is spot on: these recorded dialogues have entirely replaced my train of thought. In a sense, they help me not to think. Or, rather, it is as if, through podcasts, I have delegated the burden of thinking to someone else: podcasts are the ultimate form of interpassivity. Through podcasts you can absorb information via (an almost) direct neuronal connection. A 21c gimmick reminiscent of that Peanuts strip in which Linus (or Charlie Brown, I can't remember) tries to memorize the entire content of a book by putting it under his pillow and sleeping on it: osmosis-based learning? Podcasts are the simulacrum of the "perfect conversation": always interesting, ever engaging, devoid of filler and banal chatter, with "high production values" and "clever sound design". Podcast hosts and their guests are the friends I wish I had IRL. They perform my "aspirational" conversations with gusto, save the moment when the host suddenly starts promoting with fake enthusiasm products and services in the middle of the conversation: the uncanny "native ads" reveal the artifice, break the illusion, shatter the reality effect [double tap on the airpods to skip thirty seconds]. Podcasts are perhaps the ultimate form of parasocial interaction brought forth by the internet.
Drilled hosted by Amy Westervelt
The Dream: Season 2 hosted by Jane Marie
Intercepted hosted by Jeremy Scahill
Into The Zone hosted by Hari Kunzru
On The Media hosted by Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield
Our Plague Year hosted by Joseph Fink
Rabbit Hole hosted by Kevin Roose
Reply All hosted by PJ Vogt, Alex Goldman, and Emmanuel Dzotsi
Resistance hosted by Saidu Tejan-Thomas
Tech Won't Save Us with Paris Marx
