I’ve just started looking at (listening to, really) podcasts. My first impressions of this endeavor are that there is a lot of “look at me, looking at myself, podcasting, talking about the podcasting stuff, the podcasting community, the art of podcasting, etc. etc. etc.”
Very self-absorbed, it seems. Maybe that’s the way any new technology is - the first people who use something are much more interested in the the process of the thing they’re using, than in what you can do with it. Take, for example, the car: At first, it was the novelty and the mechanics of cars and how they operated. Then, it was what you could do to modify, add, extend, and develop the basic machine. Then, It was how one could use this to do the basic function (in the case of cars, drive somewhere). Now, the car itself has mostly faded into the background of the infrastructure. Most people think of cars as another of the tools they use to do something specific. Only a few think of the car, itself, anymore. This doesn’t count the “car as status symbol” part. That’s another universal feature about our tools.
Podcasting seems to me to be in the early, adolescent, self-conscious phase right now. The computer hardware has actually faded a bit into the background, although application software is still in that “look at me using this tool” phase.
Real content is still in the minority of the podcasts I’ve seen. I haven’t done an exhaustive search, but I notice that much of the podcasts are about the hardware, software, or some other aspect of the “creating podcast” piece of things. It hasn’t gotten to the radio phase - just turn it on, search for the content channel you want, and listen. Only a few of the “hams” still chat about the radio tools part of radio. I wonder what the podcast equivalent of “hams” will be - “podders,” “podfathers,” “casters?” When that term, whatever it will be, shows up in discussions, we’ll know that podcasting has moved out of adolescence and into infrastructure.
