MacDougall/Podcasts/MIT/Draft 1 Our New Aural Ecologies:

This paper begins by looking at the growing popularity of “podcasting ” as yet another manifestation of Walter Ong’s secondary orality. I also consider podcasting in relation to the work of McLuhan and other medium theorists. In the tradition of the beat poet, the DJ, and most recently the blogger, podcasting recasts the personal experience (the “phenomenological feel”), as well as the actual perspectives and preferences accessible to people on-the-fly via digital storage and playback of audio content. Podcasting certainly seems to blur notions of “public ” and “private ” in unprecedented ways, and a recent concept dubbed “publicy ” (privacy that occurs under the intense acceleration of instantaneous communications) accounts for this. While the podcast may be the latest and perhaps purest form of publicy, is publicy itself really anything new, or is it just a new form of orality (ie. secondary orality) that recasts us all as witness/participants to the chants and decrees of the iconoclast, village elder, and cultural mystic? I argue that podcast consumption, itself the product of complex cognitive and cultural processes, is consequential to its reconfigurations of our everyday soundscapes and the personal experiences bound up in them. MacDougall/Podcasts/MIT/Draf