Becca Butcher writes on Rephonic’s blog about how podcasts are apparently getting worse because it’s easier to make them, the biggest ones tend to have more ads, and many podcasts deal in political topics that provoke listeners’ psychosomatic hemorrhoids.
I disagree with Ms. Butcher. I don’t think podcasts are getting worse. I think podcasts (and vlogs) have always sucked. Podcasts (and vlogs) were shit in 2005. They are shit today. And if they exist in 2105 they will still be shit.
Podcasting (and vlogging) is inherently shitty for the following reasons:
- Podcasts are audio, not text.
- Podcasts generally don’t come with transcripts.
- You can’t easily take excerpts from podcasts.
- Podcasts are not searchable.
- Podcasts are slow; many of your listeners can read faster than you can talk. Some of them can type faster, too.
- Your voice is probably not as pleasant as you and your mother think it is.
- Podcasts inflate a few kilobytes of text into megabytes of audio.
Incidentally, we used to call podcasting “audioblogging, and it was shit then, too.
But before you jump on the audioblogging bandwagon, remember this - the power of the Web is the power to choose. You make your own trails, and your own links. You read what you like and skip the boring bits. And audioblogging takes that power of choice away. Your listeners become a passive audience - they have no power to skim, they can’t skip the boring parts, they can’t link or excerpt your post effectively. Your post becomes invisible to Google and other search engines. And anyone who has a hearing problem, or a dialup account, or doesn’t speak your language too well, anyone who is trying to surf your site from the office, or from an Internet cafe - well, they’re just plain out of luck.
Consider also this - the average person speaks at one hundred, perhaps one hundred fifty words per minute. Meanwhile, an accomplished reader can read ten times faster - up to a thousand words a minute, and that’s straight-up reading, not even skimming. You’re forcing people to listen to you at a speed that’s barely faster than the speed at which they can type. Why are you wasting their time? Is your voice really that beautiful?
— Maciej Cegłowski, “An Audioblogging Manifesto” (2004)
Am I just being an old man yelling at a cloud? Perhaps, but let’s be honest here: informational podcasts are nothing but blogs for the aliterate. They cater to the lazy, people who can read but prefer not to1. Political podcasts, left and right alike, are nothing but AM talk radio migrated to the internet; never mind that AM talk radio in the US is mainly dominated by right-wing cranks and has been since the Federal Communications Commission dropped the Fairness Doctrine in 19872. They do not serve their listeners; they serve only as a medium for unblockable, unskippable advertisements. That they inflate their creators’ egos is merely an ancillary benefit.
While we’re at it, let’s talk about images and video, too. Images and video are lousy at presenting information and ideas at any worthwhile length or depth for the same reason audio is unfit for this purpose. Their utility lies in emotional manipulation and their ability to prompt the viewer to feel instead of thinking. (This is what makes “memes” so insidious.)
Don’t tell me a picture is worth a thousand words. A thousand words doesn’t take up anywhere near as much space as a picture does, even if you compress it with modern algorithms like WEBP or AVIF. If you’ve got something worth saying you can damned well say it in plain goddamn text, preferably Unicode but if you’re writing on an old computer that does’t do Unicode I can probably convert whatever encoding you’re using.
Why? Any computer can handle plain text, even a fucking PDP-11. (Did you think that Ken Thompson and rest of the gang at Bell Labs created Unix on a Cuisinart?)
Now get off my lawn, delete your podcast/YouTube channel/Twitch stream/TikTok, and go read some fucking books.
Yes, I am somewhat judgmental toward people who do not like to read. Yes, this is unfair of me for an array of reasons beyond the scope of this rant. Deal with it.↩︎
You can thank (or blame) former FCC chairman Mark S. Fowler. As a matter of fact, he is a Republican. No, it probably isn’t a coincidence that a Republican led efforts to deregulate telecommunications in a manner that enabled the unchecked spread of right-wing populist propaganda, starting with that demagogue Rush Limbaugh.↩︎