This week, we began our Comm class with the idea, “The medium is the message.” This means that the way in which you present your story to the public can really create a big difference in how your message is viewed, and how your audience engages with the ideas you present.
This is why radio and podcast media are such strong forces in today’s society; we are constantly bombarded with short-form video content, AI slop, and “get ready with me” videos all in the span of a few seconds of scrolling. Because of that, when hearing a podcast, it can quickly draw audiences into listening. For many, radio shows and podcasts may seem boring at first; there’s nothing flashy, no bright colors blinking across the screen. Yet, if you stay listening for longer than ten seconds, your mind starts to paint a picture of what you’re listening to, just as if you were reading a book. Your mind starts to visualize the words and create worlds of its own, starving to use its imagination again after years of going hungry at the hands of social media. It longs to be used, your brain; it wants to be creative, so let your mind soar.
Another thing about auditory media that I find really interesting: is the development of parasocial relationships, which have become very common in recent years with the rise of podcasting and vloggers. A parasocial relationship is essentially the term used to describe when a viewer or a listener of any type of media sometimes becomes connected with the people they are watching or listening to on a personal level; the listener feels like they know the podcaster on a deep level, when in reality, the relationship is one-sided, and the podcaster has no idea that this particular listener exists. The lines can blur quickly, and incidents sometimes even happen where a fan will go up and begin talking to the podcaster or influencer on the street as if they’re longtime friends. They’ll act as if they have a close personal relationship with this person. This happens on podcasts and sometimes radio shows quite often (to a lesser extent, of course) because we as the listener feel more connected to this person speaking, that intimacy feels like they are talking directly to you, as if you were friends on a phone call. This kind of goes into the ideas touched on in some of the readings we did this week, including Hobbs R.’s “Digital Audio and Podcasting”, as well as, “Joe Rogan and the Fifth Estate: How the Podcaster and a Group of Cable News Exiles Became More
Powerful Than Traditional Media.” They both really put a close-up lens onto this new age of podcasting, and the effects we are actively seeing in today’s social atmosphere.
What’s also very new and exciting and still in the realm of auditory media, is that we’ve been learning how to edit podcasts in our Comm class this week with Adobe Podcast. The site features a text-based editing style, which means you can delete unwanted recordings as easily as if you were to delete text from a Google Doc. This process genuinely makes it so much easier than if you were to go into CapCut and delete tiny bits and segments of recording manually, so I’m really excited to be using it for our upcoming podcast project.
Ultimately, I can safely say that I have learned so much this week in class and just being on campus and enjoying all of it’s amazing resources; this week was easily even better than the last, and I have a feeling I’m going to say the same thing at the end of next week. It;’s truly astounding to me how we’ve already completed two weeks of classes, only four days left until we say goodbye to our AYA family. I’m not ready!
Communicating Change 