Writer Christine Rosen wrote an interesting article in The New Atlantis a few months back on what she terms “Egocasting”. She describes this term as:
“…the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste. In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.”
And again:
“With the advent of TiVo and iPod, however, we have moved beyond narrowcasting into “egocasting”—a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear. We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don’t agree with or don’t enjoy.”
I think she’s right but I have other ideas about this too. One the one hand, I think that this concept relies right now that the person using these tools needs to be in the technological savvy and upper income bracket. For those that can afford these items, there are many options of control and convenience. Those without the means are subjected to mass media and mass cultural influences without easy access to mechanisms that filter and process. Lets face it, most people watch too much TV and will listen to any old thing on the radio these days (we’ll see if satellite radio takes off—another filtering technology in a way, with it’s specialized “channels” of music and content).
On the other hand, as this controlling technology becomes more widely available and affordable, I think that with the ever increasing abundance of “noise” one will need to filter out more and more. When I first heard the term “Egocasting”, I interpreted it as projecting one’s own ego outward to the world. I immediately thought of “Podcasting”.
Podcasting Hype
I laughed when I first heard about Podcasting. I remembered a story from a friend about his sister. They got a portable cassette recorder when they were kids and she proceeded to play with it by recording herself—mostly it was “I’ve got a tape recorder! I can hear myself talk!” etc. etc.This is what I think a lot of Podcasting is all about at the moment.
My god! Do we really need to hear you rattle on about your drive into work this fine morning? And who cares if you have a meeting to go to in the city or how great that episode of “Desperate Housewives” was last night. For a good laugh, sample some of the links on The Freshest Podcasts in the Known Universe. You’ll find a fair amount of Jesus preaching, geeks trying to be funny/clever, microphone noise and paper shuffling. This is the noise we’re going to have to filter and sort through.
Clearly though, podcasting has gone mainstream in a very short time. Even the new version of iTunes supports it. You can subscribe to podcasts and have iTunes automatically download your favorites to listen at your leisure or off-load to your iPod. Just today I learn that CNN is now podcasting.
Though only in beta now, the new Odeo application from Blogger creator Ev Williams and partner Noah Glass provides tools similar to iTunes. [Note: I signed up for, and received a beta login]. You can browse for “shows” and “channels” as they’re called in Odeo, and then subscribe and set the file/podcast to download automatically to your computer using Odeo’s free “Syncr” application. One of the most interesting features for me of Odeo will be it’s browser based podcast recording tool—this is still being developed and not part of the current beta testing. While the Odeo site looks good and the service will be useful when it launches, they still have number of bugs to work out. I fear they’re a little late to the game and will be continually trying to play catch-up with the iTunes podcast implementation.
So far I’ve found myself to be only interested in the more professionally produced podcasts from sources like KCRW where Harry Shearer’s “LeShow” and Nic Harcourt’s “Music Exchange” originate from. Of course these folks are professional broadcasters. I’ve tried to listen to a sampling of the “Daily Source Code” by Adam Curry—an early podcaster and proponent (the new iTunes podcast area features him and laughably calls him “the podfather”)—but find him just as annoying as the other bedroom podcasters I’ve sampled so far (and hey - I’m old enough to remember when Curry was an MTV VJ…).
Somehow this all leads me to remember the CB Radio craze of the 70’s…
July 11th, 2005 at 3:36 pm
Personally, as watered down as pocasting will eventually become, it compells me to discover new music. Even if it is brought to me by smart, rich kids, these podcasters are people who know music enough and are dedicated enough to sharing it (and unfortunately their apologies for their crappy microphone and computer hum) with me.
And, for your information, I spent a thousand dollars on a ProTools set up so I can do that I’ve got a tape recorder! I can hear myself talk!
July 14th, 2005 at 6:57 pm
Legendary WFMU offers a plethora of podcasts.
http://podcast.wfmu.org/
Along with audio feeds and archives in many other forms, if you click around.
July 17th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
Ian - I can see the new music discovery angle as a plus but we’ll need to see what else is going to pan out.
Pro Tools eh? Well I’ve just recently decided to get back into home recording again and replaced my old Fostex X-15 4-track cassette recorder. I grabbed an Alesis mixer that had Cubase LE included. Sweet deal and it will do the trick. Now on 48 tracks I can say “I’ve got a tape recorder! I can hear myself talk!”
Mike - Yup - WFMU knows what they’re doing. There is some quality podcasting programming out there - it will just take some filtering.
July 24th, 2005 at 12:51 am
maddox has a humorous take on the whole blog thing:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=banish
July 24th, 2005 at 12:54 am
and the podcasting comments are included about halfway down… that’s what made me think of it.
July 26th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
“What Everyone Should Know About Blog Depression”:
http://thenonist.com/index.php/weblog/a_nonist_public_service_pamphlet/
November 4th, 2005 at 1:30 am
I take back everything I said about podcasting. People should not be given mics and public forums. They just don’t have any tact.