The Gestures of Listening to a Podcast

We decided to discuss the gestures of listening to a podcast” because one of us had listened to a very interesting podcast. Think had hosted an interview with James Marriot, the author of the Article “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society”. Conservative antagonism towards reading is evident, both in Marriott’s descriptions and in the world around us. As the consumption of new media continues to usurp people’s capacity to read for pleasure, the influence of podcasts becomes all the more pressing.

We all consume a fair amount of visual and auditory media, even as a group of people affiliated with higher education, and who elect to participate in a weekly writing group. Generally, we agreed with Marriott that this does not enable the same kind of thinking that reading does. In his interview with Think, Marriott describes the process through which a philosophical text is written. An author develops an idea, puts it down on paper, reads what they have written, and writes in response to what they’ve read. If the same author were to dictate their ideas, rather than developing them on paper, they risk losing the thread entirely. It is the act of reading and writing that enables the development of complex thought.

We examined this situation from the perspective of the listener and agreed that auditory content has a contentious relationship to thought. For one thing, they’re competing for real-estate. Podcasts can occupy the mind while you do things you’d rather not do. This poses risks, in part because obligatory tasks are not evenly distributed under capitalism. There are people who spend whole days engaged in tasks they’d like to dissociate from and others with the means to outsource this labor. In this context, the gestures of listening to a podcast become whichever gesture you’d like to forget about, like exercising, driving, or packing boxes in an Amazon warehouse for 10 hours a day. Here, we encounter the risk that one will spend such an enormous amount of time listening to podcasts that they eventually stumble upon ill-intentioned, disinformed, or hateful content. Quarantine to an individual listener through a pair of headphones, and without the critical distance that reading provides, antisocial ideas are given all the more fertile ground.

Still, I feel compelled to extend some empathy to chronic podcast listeners, and not just because I am one. This habit seems to be directly informed but the amount of dreary bullshit people are compelled to do nowadays. I’m reminded of Gravity and Grace, and Simone Weil’s concept of attention. Attention, which Weil describes as “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” allows one to observe the world without prejudice, through an act of extreme presence. After working in factories throughout Paris, Weil discovered that industrialized work threatens this capacity. She writes, “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity.” Perhaps, when a poem is not available, a podcast will have to suffice. But I’m not saying that this is a good thing.