10 min
What is a Podcast? (Episode #1) Beside the Rabbit Hole
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- Society & Culture
Beside the Rabbit Hole – Episode #1: What Even is a Podcast?
In this first episode of the first season of Beside the Rabbit Hole, I give a brief little intro to the concept of the podcast series as a whole. After that, I explain the topic for this inaugural season: the potentials and failures of the video podcast.
Podcasts seem to be everywhere these days—if you’re reading this there is a really good chance you are already familiar with what podcasts are. But when you try and come up with some sort of an all-encompassing definition that covers all types of podcasts—news, entertainment, drama, etc.—we start to see how difficult it is to define podcasts. They’re kind of like radio, but also kind of something entirely new. But throughout the various definitions of podcasts, there is an unspoken assumption that they have to be audio only.
But what if we put this assumption off to the side? In fact, in the mid- to late-2000s there was somewhat of a push to promote video podcasts as the "next generation of podcasting." Yet this never really took off and a decade later we still think of podcasts as primarily audio. If it were just the case of poor technology, we might expect video podcasts to have become popular as mobile video improved. But this wasn’t the case, and this season of Beside the Rabbit Hole hopes to interrogate just why that might be.
Be sure to check your podcast feed for a bonus "episode" – a PDF file with screenshots of the Apple website pages that were referenced in the episode. (PDF files may not display in all podcast apps – sorry! You can download this supplmental PDF on the website)
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Get in touch with me - bpettis@wisc.edu or see my website www.benpettis.com. You can also tweet at me @ben_pettis_.
Music Credits:
Voxel Revolution by Kevin MacLeod
Pamgaea by Kevin MacLeod
Mischief Maker by Kevin MacLeod
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
This episode also includes short clips from the following podcasts:
99 Percent Invisible
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me
Just the Zoo of Us
My Brother My Brother and Me
No Compromise
Serial
Up First
The NPR Politics Podcast
Apple Events
WWDC 2005 – from AppleVideoArchive on YouTube
October 2005 Special Event – from Seung-hyun Kim on YouTube
Additonal Works Cited:
Hagood, Mack. "The Scholarly Podcast." In Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, edited by Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Hansen, Samuel. "The Feed Is the Thing: How RSS Defined PodcastRE and Why Podcasts May Need to Move On." In Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, edited by Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Spinelli, Martin, and Lance Dann. Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Beside the Rabbit Hole – Episode #1: What Even is a Podcast?
In this first episode of the first season of Beside the Rabbit Hole, I give a brief little intro to the concept of the podcast series as a whole. After that, I explain the topic for this inaugural season: the potentials and failures of the video podcast.
Podcasts seem to be everywhere these days—if you’re reading this there is a really good chance you are already familiar with what podcasts are. But when you try and come up with some sort of an all-encompassing definition that covers all types of podcasts—news, entertainment, drama, etc.—we start to see how difficult it is to define podcasts. They’re kind of like radio, but also kind of something entirely new. But throughout the various definitions of podcasts, there is an unspoken assumption that they have to be audio only.
But what if we put this assumption off to the side? In fact, in the mid- to late-2000s there was somewhat of a push to promote video podcasts as the "next generation of podcasting." Yet this never really took off and a decade later we still think of podcasts as primarily audio. If it were just the case of poor technology, we might expect video podcasts to have become popular as mobile video improved. But this wasn’t the case, and this season of Beside the Rabbit Hole hopes to interrogate just why that might be.
Be sure to check your podcast feed for a bonus "episode" – a PDF file with screenshots of the Apple website pages that were referenced in the episode. (PDF files may not display in all podcast apps – sorry! You can download this supplmental PDF on the website)
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Get in touch with me - bpettis@wisc.edu or see my website www.benpettis.com. You can also tweet at me @ben_pettis_.
Music Credits:
Voxel Revolution by Kevin MacLeod
Pamgaea by Kevin MacLeod
Mischief Maker by Kevin MacLeod
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
This episode also includes short clips from the following podcasts:
99 Percent Invisible
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me
Just the Zoo of Us
My Brother My Brother and Me
No Compromise
Serial
Up First
The NPR Politics Podcast
Apple Events
WWDC 2005 – from AppleVideoArchive on YouTube
October 2005 Special Event – from Seung-hyun Kim on YouTube
Additonal Works Cited:
Hagood, Mack. "The Scholarly Podcast." In Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, edited by Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Hansen, Samuel. "The Feed Is the Thing: How RSS Defined PodcastRE and Why Podcasts May Need to Move On." In Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, edited by Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Spinelli, Martin, and Lance Dann. Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
10 min