Are Podcasts Actually Innovative*?
*A question was posed to me in 2016
Many years ago I was at a conference when a man with decades of media experience pulled me aside.
“Do you think that podcasts are actually innovative? Are they really doing something new?”
He asked this question with equal parts sarcasm, disbelief, and genuine curiosity.
It was a funny thing to ask me, given where we were standing. The conference was being held in the new co-working space that had moved into the same building where I had co-founded a production studio, more than a decade earlier, in downtown Toronto.
Back in the year 2000, I was one of the co-founders of an interactive storytelling company…which is another way to say that we once made a film for an iPad.
The main problem being that this was a full decade before iPads were invented
The story we were trying to tell was the life story of the famous tightrope walker Karl Wallenda. If you haven’t heard of him, I’ll cut to the chase: Like many of his ilk, he died when he fell off the tightrope, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1978.
Our story, which was an interactive biography, made with film and images instead of pixels, was his life story. It was meant to be watched as you “balanced” your way through the story.
If you’re thinking, that’s really cool, please stop and remind yourself that this was the year 2000. The Internet was still relatively new….Google hadn’t yet even been officially created….people still communicated with fax machines.
Yes, it was cool…so cool in fact that no one understood what we were doing.
It was innovative for certain, but perhaps too innovative, because the non-computer-geek part of our culture was not ready for the language of story to be told in this way.
It was an idea before its time
There was no way to “balance” your way through a story, from a technical perspective. So we faked it, using the arrow keys on a keyboard, for the up down, left and right commands, and the space bar, to indicate move forward.
A decade later, with the arrival of the iPad, the accelerometer would be invented, and bingo, there was actually a way to balance your way through an interactive story. You could tilt the iPad to the left and the right, to stay on balance, theoretically speaking.
Except that we had all long moved on to other things by this point. Our cutting-edge innovative project was instead collecting dust on the Mac G4 tower we had cobbled enough money to buy together.
Back to that question:
Were podcasts *actually* innovative?
And here’s what I said:
Well it’s hard to figure out how age-old story structures, told on a radio platform, listened to through (mostly) headphones, distributed by an existing but not well-understood protocol called RSS is actually truly innovative … but they are.
We were speaking generally about podcasts. It was 2016, so before the big money flooded in, before the celebs decided it was a good way to connect with their fans, years before the massive buyouts and acquisitions began to foment.
I believed this back then and I believe it even more strongly now, so I’ll re-state my position here:
Podcasts are leading the next wave of innovation in storytelling
Narrative podcasts are a new genre that has emerged
Raising the discussion here, through community dialogue, is a way to help these two previous statements come true
So I hope that you will join the discussion, and be part of the community on Bingeworthy…so that we can do beautiful work together!
Next week on Bingeworthy, I’m excited to review and discuss
Shameless Acquisition Target
“The podcast that sells itself!”
The show is many things at once:
First, it’s hilarious.
Then, it’s seamlessly also a gameshow, a podcast business mastermind, and a mockumentary.
If that sounds like an impossible balance to strike, you’re correct! Laura has done the impossible, as she pushes the genre into new territory with her show.
Next week, I’ll share my own insights about this show, and then share my interview with the shameless genre-busting woman herself, Laura Mayer.
Get ahead and listen to the show on Spotify:
Or on Apple:
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That sounds like a very cool project, about Karl Wallenda. Reminds me of that short-lived technology that was the CD-i, the interactive CD.
I don't think podcasts are a disruptive innovation like the iPhone was. But they are certainly an incremental innovation, briging together the old story telling techniques with modern technology to have all what you want to hear (and produce) available in your pocket at any time you wish.
Having said that: are you considering turning your interviews into a podcast? That would be fitting.
Hi Arjun! Thanks for jumping in here...
Ah, the days of i-CDRom. Yes in some ways it was modeled after those. I recall one that Peter Gabriel produced being very cool.
I do agree that podcasts aren’t disruptive...in the way that iPhones are. They are a mashup of old storytelling techniques...don’t disagree with any of that. But in this mashup, I think something slightly different is emerging.
Yes! Eventually I do want to turn this into a podcast as well as a newsletter. It’s in the growth plan....just gathering the audience and getting it underway first.