by Joe Miller
I have a confession. I dislike podcasts.
I’m a little hesitant to admit that because (a) I have several friends who make podcasts, (b) I have even more friends who enjoy listening to them and (c) as I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to get better about not yucking other people’s yums.
But the fact remains that I dislike podcasts.
For starters, they’re inefficient. Speech is slow and life is too short to spend 30 minutes listening to 12 minutes of information.
But my biggest objection is that the 12 minutes of information you do get is fundamentally shallow.
Spoken language lacks the complexity necessary for tackling complicated questions. It’s hard to overstate just how simple spoken language is when compared with written language.
Linguists Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich conducted a study that shows just how wide the gulf really is. They began by ranking the 10,000 most commonly used words according to the frequency with which they appear in language generally. They then measured the rank of the median word used and the frequency with which unusual words appear across samples from different types of media.
The researchers found that expert testimony—the sort of thing you might hear from the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on C-SPAN – was the most complex speech, coming in at 28.4 unusual words per 1,000 words and a median word rank of 1,008.
Most podcasts aren’t at that level of complexity. They are much more like a typical conversation between two college graduates. Those conversations typically use just 17.3 uncommon words per 1,000 and have a median word rank of 496.
Care to guess the category of written work that comes closest to the linguistic complexity of ordinary college graduate conversations?
Preschool texts, which clock in at 16.3 uncommon words per 1,000, with a median word rank of 528?
You simply cannot tackle substantive questions using the linguistic complexity you’d find in Clifford the Big Red Dog.
Nonfiction podcasts aspire to be substitutes for essays or newspaper articles. But the medium they resemble most closely isn’t print. It’s television.
In fact, an increasing number of podcasts are literally television, just with worse production values.
The writer (and, yes, podcaster) Derek Thompson notes in his provocatively titled essay Everything Is Television, that half of the top podcasts release video versions and that consumption of video podcasts is growing at twenty times the rate of their audio-only brethren.
At best, podcasts are a form of what communication theorists have dubbed “infotainment.” The term originated in the 1980s, when a group of information scientists staged comedy shows at academic conferences.
Initially, the term was mostly limited to so-called soft news – celebrity gossip or public interest stories. But it crept into mainstream news, initially on AM talk radio (think, Rush Limbaugh) and morning news programs (e.g., Good Morning America and The Today Show).
These days, infotainers can be found on the left (John Oliver), the right (Sean Hannity) and the hard-to-place (Joe Rogan).
Podcasts offer a slightly elevated – ”high class” according to economics professor and podcaster Tyler Cowen – form of entertainment.
Cowen argues that people want to engage with “the most important ideas,” but that most people can’t (often for good reasons!) actually work on those ideas because doing so is extremely time consuming.
The next best thing you can do in that situation, Cowen says, is to listen to someone else who has done the work so that you “can at least pretend that” you’ve done it.
Byrne Hobart goes even further, likening podcasts to junk food. He argues that “you will not learn anything of lasting importance from TV, movies [or] podcasts.”
Cowen and Hobart’s contention that digital media owes more to the entertainment side than to the information side of the info- tainment portmanteau is not a new one.
In 1985, media theorist Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he argues that even things that bill themselves as purely information – like the local news – are really just entertainment products.
Postman points out that television news stories are short (averaging 45 seconds), sensationalized (“if it bleeds, it leads!”), devoid of context and mostly completely irrelevant to our daily lives.
Television news doesn’t provide information we can use. It provides tidbits that provoke an immediate emotional response, that we just as immediately forget when the next segment airs less than a minute later.
Postman argues that writing starts from an underlying presumption of argument and information. Television, by contrast, starts from an underlying presumption of entertainment.
The result, Postman says, is that “not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another,” a truth that he notes most Americans find difficult to accept.
And yet, it remains true that even the nerdiest of documentaries pale in comparison to print. You’ll learn far more about climate change by spending two hours on the World Resources Institute website than you would if you spent those same two hours watching An Inconvenient Truth.
Podcasts – along with older audiovisual peers like television and film and newer entrants like YouTube videos and TikTok – allow us to feel like we’ve engaged with Big Questions.
But in practice, all they can do is entertain because speech simply isn’t dense enough to grapple with complexity. We end up with bits of data that lack context and nuance.
Text remains the best – and so far at least, the only – method available for truly coming to grips with the world’s most complex questions.
So, if you’re truly interested in a topic, turn off the podcast and go read a book.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
