A Little Bit Literate

Podcasting!

I have loved the radio my whole life. When I was a kid, I would make fake radio shows with a cassette recorder and lame ad-libbed introductions to songs taped off the oldies station. I have a radio in every room of my apartment, including the hallway (that's where we keep our crank radio). Even when I got old enough to start hating the corporate radio stations, I found the college stations and loved them even more for doing what I thought radio should do--present new and weird and interesting songs and stories and information to its specific community. Radio in Cleveland shouldn't be the same (at least not on such a wide scale) as radio in San Francisco. That's just crazy.

Then came the internet, and with it, a whole new idea of community. You may have been the only person in your town who was really really into that weird underground phenomenon, or that totally geeky sci-fi thing, or the totally cool edgy thing that everyone in your town was too conservative to get into, or you may have moved away from a culture that no one else in your new town shared, and thanks to the internet, that didn't matter anymore. You could find your people online, and share information with them, and talk about what was important to you, and they would understand. Someone else out there gets it. When I was in high school, I never found my people, never found the subculture that got what I was into, so I can really appreciate the internet's ability to take culture and make it accessible to anyone, anywhere.

Podcasts are a great way to do that. Where but on the internet (and in the NY Metro area, thanks to my favorite all-time radio station WFMU) can you find a radio show dedicated to 60's garage rock or old Victrola records? Where can you find a talk radio show about libraries or surfing or knitting? And even though a show with two drunk girls talking about their drunken nights out might not have a wide audience, their 6 drunk friends can listen in and laugh along, even if they live across the country. I'm all for quality radio/podcasts, but if you already have an audience, why care about what anyone else thinks?

So I'm really excited to be doing the podcasting workshop. I have three or four ideas for regular podcasts already. It's kind of ridiculous. I'm geeking out.

On a note that's probably more interesting to everyone in class, my husband Pete works at the City & Country School over on 13th Street, pretty much right behind Pratt. He's into audio engineering, so his boss, the head of the Upper School (I think it's ~5th-8th grade?), asked if he would help out with a podcasting class with the oldest kids, who are 12 and 13. The project, as I understand it, was originally in conjunction with someone at MIT, but the kids are on their own now, and have three episodes up. You can find it in iTunes by searching for "Technical Difficulties." (There are two podcasts with this name--theirs is the one that is not explicit, naturally.) They're trying to widen their audience, so feel free to subscribe and give it a try.

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They've also started a ning social network, where you can also listen to and comment on the podcasts. It's a great chance to hear what kids have to say about using new media, and to see it in action. They're talking about a lot of the same stuff we're talking about--safety and privacy online, what you make public on social networking sites, etc.--only from the standpoint of kids, which for many in our class is our intended audience. The first one, in which the kids talk about how adults can better learn to use technology, is kind of hilarious. "Corporations, help us out, make a parent-friendly phone."

On another podcasting note, the aforementioned WFMU spearheaded the creation of a new and really great resource for podsafe music which they recently unveiled, the Free Music Archive. That's "free" as in beer and "free" as in speech. All the songs have been cleared for sampling, downloading, and using in podcasts, etc. It's also really nice-looking and user friendly. Did I already mention how much I love WFMU? Seriously. I love it.