technology
Podcasts: the new medium of choice? by Rachel Agius
W
hat better way to learn about a person than to look through their music collection? Learning about someone's musical taste can reveal plenty about their personality, perhaps even revealing whether or not their White Stripes would get along with your Janis Joplin. While in the past this necessitated the browsing of a record or CD library, now thousands of songs are nestled neatly in the average backpack or briefcase, in slender mp3 players that can do almost everything aside from make toast. But whether it's Beyonce, Mozart or Michael Jackson that takes up the most virtual memory, the wonderful world of the internet has brought us something just as portable and equally telling as anyone's musical anthology. Podcasts are, very simply put, radio programs for your music player. The huge popularity of Apple's iPod as the mp3 player of choice contributed to the 'pod' portion of the neologism while the similarity to traditional radio broadcasting proffered the 'cast'. In 2003, Apple released a version of iTunes with the built-in capacity to retrieve and store podcast files from their sources – and these sources can be very varied indeed. From topical discussion to daily news to comedy, there is so much to choose from that finding time to listen to all of them might become a problem. Suddenly, sitting in traffic is not a total waste of time. Incidentally, the car is often the preferred location for some alone time with one's podcasts. There is no need to take your eyes off the road, there's plenty of opportunity to voice your disagreement in complete privacy (although you should remember to close the windows) and they offer a good way to take your mind off the clattering old Fiat in front of you which seems, by way of its obnoxious belching of fumes, to be solely responsible for global warming. Podcasts are by nature an interactive medium. Anyone with basic recording equipment and a little imagination can make and publish a podcast, which means that a listener can often become a producer in their own right. Because it is free, podcasting can reach a wide audience and the easy organisation and storage of the audio files means that listeners can have access to an entire archive of episodes within minutes. This episodic nature of podcasts recalls both traditional television and radio broadcasts as well as the more recent vlog or video blog, which found its place on You Tube and other video sites. In fact, it seems to bridge the gap between the two – podcasts are often broadcast according to a schedule just
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vida.com.mt | Issue 29 | May 2012