I admit I’m a bit of an oddity. I don’t listen to many podcasts, and I never have. I am constantly discovering podcasts that my friends have known about for years. Outside of about 2-3 shows that I keep up with regularly, I usually only listen if the guest/topic is unusually interesting to me, or if I see a particular episode recommended a lot. This seems very different than a lot of my friends, for whom daily podcasts are part of the routine.
To clarify: I have nothing against podcasts. I do listen to them. Sometimes I even appear on them. I don’t hate the idea of doing my own podcast one day. But podcasting just doesn’t feel native to me at all in the way writing does. And I actually think this might work to my advantage in a couple ways.
Recently I was invited onto a very well-done podcast by a talented host. I told him during recording (which hasn’t been released, so I don’t know if it will make the final cut or not) that I thought podcasting was now something every single person thinks they can do, and only about 5% of people can actually do well. In my experience, the podcasting world is saturated with people who approach it as a kind of audio diary for their brand. A normal podcast is where a host turns on a mic, share inside jokes with their friends/guests, go on long rabbit trails about Netflix, and basically just shoots the breeze for 45 minutes. They think it’s automatically interesting. Sometimes it is. Often it’s not!
My own personal feeling has long been that the bar for making a quality podcast is a lot higher than most people think it is, while the bar for doing quality writing is actually much lower than people think. By that I don’t mean that all writing is good writing or that it’s easy to write well. But I do mean that mediocre writing can be compelling and have an impact in a way that a mediocre podcast cannot.
Reactive Attention vs. Sustained Attention
We are told again and again that we live in a “post-literary” society. People don’t read; they stream. Even social media has fully shifted from the text-based “status” to the multimedia-oriented “post.” This is true as a matter of bare fact. But it undersells just how resilient reading and readers are. The print book industry, for example, is still doing pretty well. Web articles can have broad impact through citation and re-circulation; think of
’s “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” or ’s “The State of the Culture.”