I’ve been listening to podcasts for about 20 years now, about as long as I’ve been doing anything regularly and roughly the full lifespan of the podcast. Long enough at least that I have noticed the major shift they have undergone in the last few years. When I first started listening they were primarily actual radio programs distributed via RSS. This meant they could expand listenership to those who didn’t happen to be around their radios during broadcast time (perfect, since radio listening was beginning to decline, though it is still much stronger than I would have guessed). I remember describing it to my mother: “It’s a radio show you can download and listen to anytime.” The accessibility of RSS syndication meant everyone could broadcast, and that’s what they did! This continued a long time. Podcasting was a free-form audio genre that became it’s own pillar of the media institutions (RIP Gimlet Media) but was accessible to anyone because of the openness of distribution (of which I learned all kinds of things from Manton Reese’s write-up about syndication). There were the pros, radio people who found creative freedom away from the clock and radio format needs, but using largely the same set of professional tools. The archetypal This American Life, an actual radio show rebroadcast as a podcast, and its many imitators are the coin of this realm. Then there were the indie folks. People with a passion project that found an audience through the delivery of the podcast feed. Two great examples of this are the History of Rome podcast and the History of English podcast. Both wildly nerdy, encyclopedic passion projects run by amateur enthusiasts. All of these are in the lineage of radio. Scripted or structured interviews, they are information, entertainment, edutainment, criticism, and commentary. They could be many things, but they had the soul of radio without the limits. The technological constraint of radio is the limitations of the AM and FM radio bands. You can only cram so many channels into the Very High Frequency band, and you are limited to a certain power transmission. These are regulatory controls more than technological, but they had major cultural impacts. Radio is regional. You can reliably find a public radio station in the 80s or low 90s, and they will syndicate a lot of the same shows, but the announcers and local commentary will indeed be local to you. This limitation means a finite variety of channels in any vicinity, and thus at least some amount of cultural cohesion in a location. Nearly everyone I knew growing up listening to our local public radio and thus exposure to a similar band of information. We were on the same wavelength (sorry, that’s all my radio puns). RSS (magical as it is!) means everyone is chasing personal interests, which are likely not provided for locally and take the place of local news. (Radio also had a profound influence on music genres and commercialism. Interesting interview here.) About 2023 there seems to have been a seismic shift in the nature of podcasting. I first started to notice that younger people (late teens and 20s, my students) started talking about podcasts again. There was a while there where the fact that I listened to podcasts was a generational marker, but all of sudden we were all listening to podcasts again! Then I realized my students meant something wildly different by “podcast” than I did. All at once I started seeing people posting YouTube videos with a host and guests sitting on couches talking into microphones about whatever banality of the day was getting clicks, and this was a “podcast.” I noticed that all the podcasts I listen to (almost exclusively in the car) started referring to those “watching” since they had started recording in video. About the same time various smutty “podcasts” became wildly popular and a “podcast” hosted by someone with a tangential relationship to the world biggest pop star became a major culture force. (I don’t intend to burden my mind with understanding how all of that worked, but I understand they are getting married). Dear reader, what I just described is daytime television. The podcast I grew up with is something you download and listen to on your iPod while you mow the lawn or ride the train or exercise. They are primarily monologues. Maybe you learn something you discuss over dinner (the famous words, “There’s that episode of This American Life…”). The new podcast you watch on YouTube while attractive people with full makeup interact in charming ways. They are almost exclusively unscripted and conversational and draw on celebrity power to attract viewership. This shift from exclusively audio to primarily video is a major portion of why Derek Thompson’s argument that everything is television is so convincing. Privately watching distant people, the state of Television, is the default state of being alone. And the podcast has become exactly this: being alone while observing other people together. I also wonder if it has become the dominant form of conversation. Listening to this podcast (which I downloaded and listened to in the car like a proper millennial) this week I was somewhat amused by the way the host and guest sound almost exactly alike. They are both intensely “conversational” in their manner. They talk about interesting things as well, but I suspect the main benefit we get from these is that we feel like we are participating in an engaging conversation, a privilege it seems harder to find IRL.