In the past two years, listening to podcasts has become a new popular phenomenon in Chinese society, which is often evaluated by the media and academic circles as a kind of "return" of "auditory culture". In the context of auditory culture, radio is to some extent the predecessor of podcasts, whether Chinese or foreign, the anchors of today's well-known podcasts often have experience in the broadcasting industry, and some podcasts are directly born from various FM radio programs. Today, the wave of digitalization has not swept the media field for a year and a half, and the statement that "broadcasting is dead", like the argument that "newspapers are dead", seems to be a rare topic.
Still, skepticism has always been there. Just earlier this month, a report in Britain's New Statesman newspaper pointed out that despite the growing strength of audiovisual streaming, nearly 90% of British adults still listen to traditional broadcasts every week. That's close to the 1999 census, which New Statesman said showed that 89 percent of people in their age listened to the radio at least once a week.
This issue of Readings discusses the following topics: How can local radio stations in the UK be "revived"? Compared with the emerging streaming media, what are the advantages of traditional broadcasting that are difficult to replace? How do the characteristics of the medium take an interesting loop between the old and new forms?
"Companionship":
The personified nature of broadcasting
Image source: improvepodcast.com
"It seems to me that the demise of broadcast media has happened many times in history, but not once has it become a fact," said Ben Cooper, chief content officer of British media giant Bauer.
Traditional radio has experienced the challenges of tape, music television, the Internet and other new media, but it has not disappeared from everyone's vision. Cooper said that its recent opponent may be a podcast that is very similar to itself, which not only has a higher verticality in content, but also makes it easier to build a community around its own theme, more in line with the rhythm of life and cultural characteristics of the new era, especially popular with "Generation Z".
There have been many reports that podcasts have quickly become one of the most important mediums during the pandemic, playing an extremely important role in communicating emotions, building connections, and accessing information. In a Digital Music News article, New York University scholar Lary Miller said that the traditional broadcasting industry is being abandoned by the young people of "Generation Z", streaming platforms have become a more favored source of income for businesses, and automakers have begun to marginalize radio design on dashboards.
However, even in the face of the challenge of podcasting, traditional broadcasting is still tenacious. According to Rajar, britain's official broadcast data agency, even though the use of in-vehicle FM broadcasting has been increasing over the past decade, it accounts for only a quarter of all broadcast hours. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, 60% of traditional broadcasters listened at home.
The article points out that the vitality of traditional radio stations still has some foundations that are difficult to shake. One of the most important points is the accessibility of the medium. According to Rajar, even after a small drop in listening at the beginning of the century, traditional commercial radio still reaches more than half of the population every week. A 2019 article in the University of Maryland's Sidewinder newspaper also pointed out that in a significant proportion of the population, the habit of frequent internet use has not been cultivated. According to an interview with Jacobs Media, only 16 percent of respondents believe that old-fashioned AM/FM radios will eventually be replaced by digital media platforms. Of course, a large number of traditional broadcasts are also undergoing a digital transformation to adapt to new media channels.
Medium's article gives some additional explanations. Media scholar Tiffany Eurich believes that the ancient history of human beings transmitting information and emotions through oral narration has made us have a lasting fascination and dependence on sound, which makes it difficult for the sound medium to die out in a short period of time. Moreover, in an age when visual information frequently bombards us, the sound medium provides a necessary buffer for our attention. The information conveyed by audio can give people more space for imagination than visual information, "When you are 'listening' to the story, you can fully use your imagination to fill in the blank space of those information, and you can also capture a lot of unspoken meanings through the nuances of tone and tone."
However, this may only be a superficial reason. As Cooper emphasizes at the end of the New Statesman article, the most important motivation that radio has brought to people in the past two years has been to build strong companionship. "In the closed state of the epidemic, people hope to use a solid sense of companionship, which can make people feel that their lives are being watched and cared for." Compared with the standardized recording of programs on the Spotify streaming platform, the instant accompaniment attribute of traditional broadcasting may be stronger. This is what Rebecca Frank, a content practitioner interviewed, calls the "personified" nature of broadcasting — it makes you feel like you're meeting a living person. "We've found that the latest streaming services, whether podcasts or videos, want to 'replicate' this element of humanity that radio has."
Image source: Uk's New Statesman website
"Storytelling":
The human impulse that cannot be eliminated
Back in 2018, The New Yorker magazine published a famous long article by critic Rebecca Mead about "why podcasts are tempting," which actually noticed the same problem. Mead believes that the essence of podcasting is "storytelling." The article begins with a mention of Benjamin's The Storyteller, in which Benjamin has no trouble pointing out that the art of "storytelling" is becoming a victim of modernization, a typical example of which is the globalization of information with technological developments, which has a standardized, authoritative form and can quickly reach readers – although its form does not necessarily guarantee that it will be more "real" than the story.
"The Storyteller", by Benjamin, Wenjin Publishing House, January 2022.
Today, the impulse to "tell stories" has not been eliminated by modernization, but has been revived in the podcast medium, which fully confirms the views of the scholar Yuval Harari. In the best-selling trilogy, A Brief History of Mankind, Harari repeatedly reiterated the importance of storytelling for the development of human civilization. It is even believed that the ability to narrate constitutes the fundamental driving force for the development of civilization. Mead lists a number of well-known podcasts, all with "storytelling" at its core. For example, "Serial", founded by Sarah Koenig in 2014, tracks a 1999 school murder through podcasts. The highlight is that Koenig shows not only the entire process of the investigation, but also her mental activity throughout, emotions that cannot be recorded by media other than podcasts. "The psychological torture process displayed by journalists often makes Serial a show that must be listened to."
Mead also mentioned that the show has a distinctly stylistic feature, namely that the language is full of "uncertainty", hesitation, and "informality". In the text media, this may be a disadvantage to expression. But in the intimate context of listening to a podcast, the authors think it's a great help to evoke emotional following and immerse themselves in the stories that the podcast delivers. On this issue, Mead also mentioned a key point, namely the influence of traditional public radio stations on the way podcasts are expressed today.
She believes that "This Amrican Life," a traditional radio show, shapes this expression. The show, hosted by Ira Glass, has a "loose, personal, and often error-prone approach to narration and conversation." But this is very close to the "humanization" of the broadcast mentioned above, and it is also very similar to the state of chatting in daily life. In 1999, journalist Marshall Sella wrote in Time magazine that Glass's show had an "uncomfortable intimacy" — and that it didn't seem to be a criticism either. Mead points out that this mode of discourse has now become a "cliché" of some sort of podcast.
Image source: The New Yorker website.
More than just "broadcasting":
A media archaeology perspective
We can make a slightly arbitrary judgment here: although the forms of media are always changing, the needs and desires of certain communications will continue to recur in the medium – such as the "human" nature of broadcasting. This may also explain the origin of the vitality of "old" media such as broadcasting.
From the now popular view of media archaeology, it is true that the characteristics of the medium often appear in this interesting cycle between old and new forms. For example, in 2020, the famous media scholar Lev Manovich published a translation of "The Language of New Media", and Manovich also mentioned an example of digital cinema in the book. Much of what makes up a traditional film is actually the reality in front of the camera— even if it's carefully arranged. For digital films, the real shots are far from the final result, but only the original material, and the later stage needs to be processed in a complex way on the computer. The process is more similar to the work of some "pre-cinema" eras, such as the manual coloring of "silent films". Manovich puts it bluntly: "We usually equate computerization with automation, but now the result is the opposite: what was once recorded automatically with a camera now needs to be drawn frame by frame."
The representative work of the silent film ("silent film") period, "Modern Times".
In this sense, arguments such as the "death of broadcasting" may be repeated, but it is unlikely to come true anytime soon. After all, people may not have a special obsession with a certain type of medium, but they may have an obsession with "human" companionship and stories. An article by Forbes discussed the current situation of many "old media.". In the music industry, despite the rapid growth of the digital music market, McCarty, a former sales manager at Sony, found that sales of vinyl records, an ancient music medium, have grown by double digits over the past decade. "Some people have an innate need for collecting, which includes materiality," McCarty says.
The same example is also reflected in the field of reading. In July 2021, a study of 2,000 adults in the UK by the Journal of Literature showed that despite the increasing perfection of e-readers, nearly two-thirds of readers also prefer to read paper books rather than e-books, and 46% of them believe that the main reason is the feeling of "turning pages". In the Toronto Star's 2020 survey in Canada, 56 percent of respondents "only read books on paper." Psychologist Elena Turoni said in an interview with the Journal of Literature that reading is not only a mental activity, but also an activity highly related to physical experience. "E-readers may erase these bodily sensory memories — the pattern of the cover, the size of the book, the shape, the font, etc." It may be that they have made paper books always have a strong vitality. Forbes begins by saying that despite the rapid shift in media forms, we can widely observe the persistence of our once favorite mediums — presumably because we need to "live."
Regarding broadcasting, the aforementioned Mead article also mentions an important issue, namely that Glass's show also offers a different "type" of voice — a "sensitive, hesitant" male voice. Previously, the male voice in the public voice was often very in line with the traditional "masculinity", and the voice was loud and firm. In fact, it is not just the gender characteristics of voice, Mead believes that podcasts as a medium provides valuable diversity for the public voices in our lives — many voices that were once unable to make are easier to reach the ears of Americans, and people of color and marginalized people can build their own small communities through podcasts.
Image source: The Guardian.
This "diversity of sounds" also includes spatial diversity, although for broadcasting, this diversity may be eroding. Two Op-eds in the Guardian in 2020 reported on the disappearance of "local radio stations" in the UK. At the time, the Bauer Group announced that nearly 50 local broadcasts in England would be integrated into a national network, such as the Cathedral FM in Yorkshire and Signal 107 in the West Midlands, which would be replaced by programmes produced in London. The Guardian commented that the demise of local broadcasting was a "quiet decline" compared to the shutdown of local newspapers and seemed to be seen as something more "deserved".
While we don't have to worry too much about the "death of broadcasting," this crisis of "vocal diversity" is indeed worthy of attention. The Guardian article argues that, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, local broadcasting provides companionship and social support that is closest to people's life scenes, which may be difficult for national broadcasting to replace. The hosts of these local radio stations may also have accents in the language, and listeners in the local community will sound more friendly. The article also believes that the large-scale integration of media groups has changed the "sound landscape" of people's lives to a certain extent, and the disappearance of local independent broadcasting also means the homogenization of a "unique sound". This may also affect people's "sense of place" in the long run. "In an increasingly hectic, fractured culture, local broadcasts offer you something truly unique. Hearing the dialect accents transmitted in the airwaves, you will be transported from all over the world back to the place that really means to you, and find a precious sense of identity with 'home'. When it's gone, we're sure to miss it."
Reference Links:
https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2022/04/in-with-the-old-how-radio-is-beating-streaming-at-its-own-game
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/how-podcasts-became-a-seductive-and-sometimes-slippery-mode-of-storytelling
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/08/31/radio-dead-musonomics-study/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/capitalone/2017/10/18/media-misconceptions-is-traditional-media-dead-not-even-close/?sh=479e0899723b
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/may/27/local-radio-regional-stations-england-bauer-rebranding-national-network
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/local-broadcasting-regional-radio-tv-shows-local-communities
https://improvepodcast.com/storytelling-in-podcasting/
Author | Liu Yaguang
Edit | Li Yongbo Qingqingzi
Proofreading | Wang Xin