Growing up, I’ve always been taught, whether by parents, teachers, or any other adult in my life, to listen when others are speaking. That might have been because I was a forgetful child with a low attention span when it came to subjects like math, but that’s beside the point. Nevertheless, it has always been engraved into my skull to pay close attention to when others are speaking because I might just learn something very valuable from them. This is what makes media such as podcasts so effective in spreading ideas across communities. It leans into one of the primary human senses, hearing.
Throughout this week, we’ve learned how different aspects of podcasts can make listeners more trusting and feel as though they know the host personally, or, in other words, a parasocial relationship, not just through music and editing but through intimacy of voice. People tend to feel more emotionally connected with each other when hearing each other’s voice because they may find comfort in details like their tone. This creates a sense of trust in them to the point where they’ll be more willing to side with them. This is why podcasts and, earlier on, radios were extremely effective at spreading messages for positive civic causes, or even propaganda. In the article, “Joe Rogan and the Fifth Estate: How the Podcaster and a Group of Cable News Exiles Became More Powerful Than Traditional Media” by Variety, we see how this form of media might have been one of the turning points for Donald Trump’s political campaign considering how this specific podcast’s targeted demographic was a younger male audience. Focusing in on one specific group of people might have been why he found more success expanding his radical perspectives.
Similarly, in the podcast episode titled “Three Miles” by The American Life, not only does the host take us through a program where high school students from both a private school and a public school in one of the poorest districts in the country meet, it speaks on the divide between students of varied backgrounds and opportunities, as well as how their lives progressed after graduating. It shines a light on the gap between race, resources, opportunity, and the inequalities between these students as a whole. Through the different perspectives of the different students that took part in the program, it also shows how their interpretations of meeting people that were in the complete opposite situation as them and that were possible even ten steps ahead of them, whether painful or uplifting, was an enlightening experience that later affected their lives if they realized it or not. I was listening to this as I took the bus to this USC program, one that I worked so hard to get accepted into, and I couldn’t help but connect with Melanie, one of the students that had been interviewed. She did all she could do to get accepted into a prestigious university and out of the Bronx, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t good enough. I would be lying if I said that that wasn’t one of my greatest fears, and just putting myself in her shoes and imagining how she must’ve felt made me want to turn right back around and take the bus back home. You could say it was an eye-opener for me. Yet, would I have had the same reaction and been impacted in the same way if the host had chosen to use different music, edited it to sound less conversational, or even if she had been less invested in telling all these different stories? I don’t believe I would have.
All in all, in this day and age, podcasts hold a lot of power, just like any other form of media, when used in both a way that can create change and uplift a community to take action and in a way that can destroy humanity. What separates it from other forms like newspaper and video content is how it tunes into the trust and reliance caused by simply relying on our hearing. The reason it works is that it’s like having a regular conversation with a close friend. While I don’t listen to podcasts very often, I can attest to the feeling of talking to one of my close friends that I hadn’t seen in years about a random topic while listening to one of them.
Communicating Change 