The Podcaster's Dilemma. Nolan Higdon
is an audio brick thrown at the plateglass window of corporate misinformation, as Garza and her guests take back the narrative. Speaking as a member of the loving communities that she advocates for, Garza urges her listeners: “We do it for the culture, so the podcast is free 99 because we know, with the country in chaos, the least we could do is keep you from putting your money anywhere else than where it’s needed.”3
Garza’s Lady Don’t Take No! is emblematic of the hundreds of podcasts that we have undertaken to review and critique in this book. We are interested in understanding how contemporary voices in digital media are built upon the legacy of post-World War II revolutionary radio in places such as Algeria, Cuba, and Angola. We pay attention to the seamless flow between the home studios where so many of these broadcasts are recorded and the communities of voiceless and underrepresented people, who now have a public forum where they can express the unadulterated truth of their lived experiences. We are interested in the pro-Black, pro-Brown, pro-Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), pro-indigenous, pro-queer, pro-working-class voices, which critique, interrogate, deconstruct, and engage in a revolutionary struggle of ideas against the slant and spin of corporate news media that manipulate fear, resentment, and division in order to manufacture consent. We are interested in the broad explosion of intersectional voices in dialogue about everything, from political organizing to plant-based diets. We are interested in the myriad coalitions that are formed behind the microphone. We are interested in alternative and anti-capitalist funding models that emphasize cooperation and collaboration over competition. We are interested in podcasting as a medium of decolonization.
Podcasting has exploded as a form of communication in recent years. In 2021 there were over 1 million active podcasts that contained more than 30 million podcast episodes.4 In 2018 these numbers stood respectively at 550,000 and 18.5 million.5 A 2019 study found that over half of Americans had listened to a podcast and over one third listen to a podcast monthly.6 These nascent media makers draw in sizable audiences, which range in the hundreds of thousands to millions.7 The phenomenon of podcasters increasing audience size is part of a broader trend, in which audiences abandon legacy media in favor of digital content. Indeed, television, radio, and newspapers have seen a precipitous drop in audience size over the last two decades.8 Meanwhile, from 2016 to 2017, the numbers of Americans who receive their news from online sources increased from 38% to 43%, while the number of viewers who receive their news from television decreased from 57% to 50%.9 Over that same year, the proportion of Americans who rely on social media for their news surpassed the proportion of those who rely on newspapers.10 By 2020, YouTube was steadily increasing as a news source for 26% of Americans.11 In fact recent data reveal that even old generations, which have constituted the majority of legacy media audiences for decades, are increasingly depending upon digital spaces for their news.12
Podcasts are digital files with audio or video content that, once accessed, allow users to “timeshift and place-shift their listening and viewing habits through the downloading of content onto a personal computer or a portable media player for immediate or future viewing.”13 Podcasts should be understood as a continuation of auditory media such as radio. Podcasts and radio are similar but differ in audio quality, program advertisements, and time limits on broadcasts. Furthermore, podcast production is relatively affordable by comparison with recording in radio studios, and podcasts can be disseminated through the Internet rather than through traditional radio broadcast networks. As a result, they are easier to create than radio programs and more accessible to audiences.
Radio and podcasting also differ in terms of their target audience. Where radio producers have traditionally focused on developing content that would attract the largest audience possible, podcasters tend to develop content for smaller or niche audiences. For example, rather than marketing themselves as concerned with any and all issues, podcasts are dedicated to specific themes. Thus, Speak Out with Tim Wise is a podcast focused “on racial and economic justice in the age of Trump.” Another one, titled Mansplaining, describes itself as “a gender-aware explication of hyper-masculinity in popular films.” Where radio and other traditional media offer milquetoast content that avoids controversial topics for a litany of reasons, including fears about alienating audiences, or about Federal Communication Commission (FCC) violations, podcasters are more edgy, both in their use of ribaldry and in their content. For example, they have titles that would be forbidden in traditional media, such as The Manwhore, Guys We Fucked, and CockTales: Dirty Discussions.
As critical scholars and podcasters, we were aware that media producers use the podcasting space for decolonization. Upon closer examination, we discovered that there is a dearth of research concerning the ways in which underprivileged communities utilize podcasting as a space of decolonization. Most of the scholarship on podcasting so far has focused on uses in educational settings.14 The present study seeks to contribute to the field by advancing our understanding of podcasting as a space of decolonization across a broad spectrum of social, cultural, and political settings.
Literature Review
Our review of the scholarship revealed that podcasting holds an important place in the long and well-documented history of radio.15 This is particularly clear in the work of Gretchen King, who applied a “de-westernizing and internalizing” framework for mapping the historical evolution of the global community’s radio projects from the early 1900s to the present. King organized her research into four stages: the experimental stage (1900s–1940s); the wildfire stage (1950s–1960s); the solidarity stage (1970s–1980s); and the resurgence stage (1990s to the present).16 King’s experimental stage features the early days of radio broadcasting history, when individuals who experimented with community-based broadcasting contested statal (or military) and commercial domination over the airwaves.17 The wildfire stage covers the rise of unlicensed, clandestine political radio.18 The solidarity phase is characterized by the growth of community radio associations “that shared resources, built up sector capacity, and collaborated in policy advocacy initiatives at the regional and national level.”19 The resurgence phase sees the return of both licensed and pirate community radio, in a direct response to neoliberal budget policies.20
Podcasting
Podcasting and digital media are not only contemporaneous with the resurgence phase of community radio: they are a digital extension of modern community radio, particularly given their shared critique of and resistance to neoliberalism. Additionally, similar legislation and the growing accessibility of technology, which provided fertile ground for the resurgence of community radio, exist in the space of digital communication.21 With respect to technological access, King notes:
An additional factor aiding the rapid growth of community radio during the Resurgence period was the increasing accessibility and affordability of radio production and distribution technology. Prior to the 1990s, radio stations or producers wanting to share content either required an expensive connection (typically via satellite or high-grade phone line) or relied on shipping recordings through the mail. With the spread of the internet, new websites were launched like Radio4all.net and Archive.org, which went online in 1996, and Indymedia.org, created in 1999, for the free uploading and immediate distribution of audio files.22
Here King acknowledges the significant overlap between community radio and digital technologies, justifying not only the governing analogy of our project but also the notion that decolonizing podcasts are a contemporaneous outgrowth of the resurgence phase of King’s model, in technology as well as in substance.
Our insistence on the analogous nature of radio and digital communication is supported in much of the emerging critical literature on digital communication. For example, Tiziano Bonini’s analysis of the polymedia intermingling of radio and social media during the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey suggests profound continuities between old and new