I truly don't think Benjamin's point in his essay was "all these unwashed masses looking at bad copies of Art are Doin It Wrong and culture is hopelessly corrupted thereby," but that's what a lot of people have warped it into.
NOOOOooooooooooo Maybe this article is better. After yesterday’s, I couldn’t bring myself to read it.
ETA -- Gave in to curiosity and read it – it’s better than the other article, I think; though I would have liked a stronger distinction between podcast and radio, otherwise the reader’s likely to think “what’s the big deal, broadcasting has been around for eighty years or so?” The differences between the two, in my opinion – the relative ease of making and distributing podcasts allows for more independently-produced shows; and unlike a radio broadcast, a podcast is selected, downloaded and listened to at leisure. This is the big difference – the “seductive” condensation/rearrangement of time that the article ascribes to some podcasts was present in, oh let’s pick the most obvious example, the Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds -- but it’s hard to imagine anyone mistaking that classic for a real broadcast about a Martian invasion*, simply because to hear it, they would have to download a file labelled “Mercury Theatre Presents: H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.” They’re not going to accidentally stumble in midway through the first half.
*I am also in the camp who suspect the public panic was at least partly exaggerated by the newspapers to discredit the rival medium, and there may also have been an element of “every crazy thing someone did the night of October 30th, 1938, was subsequently ascribed to “Martian Panic,” and not “Hallowe’en mischief,” like it would have been most years.”
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Date: 2018-11-13 05:52 pm (UTC)From:“In 1936, Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and cultural critic, published an essay titled ‘The Storyteller.’”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/how-podcasts-became-a-seductive-and-sometimes-slippery-mode-of-storytelling
NOOOOooooooooooo
Maybe this article is better. After yesterday’s, I couldn’t bring myself to read it.
ETA -- Gave in to curiosity and read it – it’s better than the other article, I think; though I would have liked a stronger distinction between podcast and radio, otherwise the reader’s likely to think “what’s the big deal, broadcasting has been around for eighty years or so?” The differences between the two, in my opinion – the relative ease of making and distributing podcasts allows for more independently-produced shows; and unlike a radio broadcast, a podcast is selected, downloaded and listened to at leisure. This is the big difference – the “seductive” condensation/rearrangement of time that the article ascribes to some podcasts was present in, oh let’s pick the most obvious example, the Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds -- but it’s hard to imagine anyone mistaking that classic for a real broadcast about a Martian invasion*, simply because to hear it, they would have to download a file labelled “Mercury Theatre Presents: H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.” They’re not going to accidentally stumble in midway through the first half.
*I am also in the camp who suspect the public panic was at least partly exaggerated by the newspapers to discredit the rival medium, and there may also have been an element of “every crazy thing someone did the night of October 30th, 1938, was subsequently ascribed to “Martian Panic,” and not “Hallowe’en mischief,” like it would have been most years.”