Maybe it’s tied into what I said earlier about “being bad at watching television,” but I have an admission to make: I’m really rather bad at listening to podcasts, and I feel bad for this inadequacy. I think podcasts are great things, and I think that there should be more podcasts and more people listening to podcasts, but I’m just bad at it.
The thing is that I have a hard time consuming media, particularly non-music audio, when I’m doing anything else. I can even sometimes work when a television is on, if I have headphones and something to do1, and I really like radio as a form (particularly what some podcasters are doing with it), but sound can really be distracting. So the only time I often have to listen to podcasts is when I can’t do anything but listen. Like I listen to podcasts during road trips, or when I’m doing some sort of rote task like data entry or filing, there are a couple of other situations where I don’t get too distracted (knitting, but I often use knitting time to watch TV).
But no matter what else has a claim on my attention the fact remains that I’m pretty tragically behind on my podcast listening. Particularly in light of RSS, I’ve found blogs so fun to read because one can squeeze a few posts in, in-between other tasks, but I find myself trying (or needing) to schedule in time to listen to podcasts.
Merlin Mann, said of video podcasts and his “The Merlin Show” on a podcast months ago (see I’m behind, actually I think I was more caught up at that time, but you’d never know) that independent media has a niche to feel in shorter form content of 30 mins and less, that there isn’t a market for on television, for instance (more so on radio I suppsoe, but it’s different.) Anyway, I wonder if this has something to do with the difficulties of scheduling “consumption time,” for podcast listening. Thoughts anyone?
Anyway, Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment ;)
Best, tycho
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I’m tragically bad at being in a room with an on-television without becoming mesmerized by the experience. ↩︎