Well, the podcasting bug has finally bitten, late but hard. I’m currently addicted to the BBCs In Our Time and CBCs Quirks and Quarks, and several NPR shows. My commute to work has become far more enriching in the process. It’s like getting an few extra free lectures in history or science per week. Here’s hoping the effect will show over time.

My initial critical stance towards podcasting as a revolutionary force will therefore need revision. The following things are still true, however:

Unless new technology comes along (such as better voice to text), podcasts will remain opaque to the increasingly important pervasive search abilities of operating systems (well, my operating system) and Google. Podcasts won’t show up in searches based on what is inside them, unless you were to annotate or transcribe them, which is a nuisance. (But then again, we tend to annotate or tag pictures, don’t we?) This will continue to limit their efficiency as a searchable store of knowledgeI have also been skeptical of tagging as a meme. Why do something manually that Google does better automatically? For podcasts, however, it may be the best option for now, as it may be for pictures..

Podcasts are terrible unless they’re by people who know what they are talking about. That is also the case for text blogs, of course, but the cost of realizing that a blog is terrible is much lower in terms of time and effort than realizing a podcaster is terrible.

Furthermore, podcasts are useless unless they are the best medium for the message. If you aren’t blind, visually scanning text will always be a far faster method of soaking up informationThe blind can also use text-to-speech, or have the results of text searches read out to them., so podcasts need to exploit their limited competitive advantage. Podcasts work for interviews, lectures, comedy shows or learned debate, where the timeliness of the delivery is not so critical and the cost of transcribing the voices outstrips the value added from doing so. In other words, podcasts work for the delivery of natively oral niche discourses free from newscycle pressures.

In other cases, such as with comedy, the very nature of the delivery adds value, so podcasts of the BBC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy shows would obviously be far preferable to the script.

For several years now, streaming on-demand delivery of radio programs via the interneet has complemented radio delivery by making them available A) anywhere in the world you have internet access, and B) whenever you want. Podcasts further improve on A) by letting you hear them anywhere, period.

I think the advantage of letting you take your on-demand audio that extra mile has yet to be fully exploited. When it is, there will be many more uses in the vein of architectural walking tours through cities, much as how museums today use audio devices to aid romps through exhibitions.

I’m less optimistic about the idea that podcasts of “working-class” rallies and meetings will somehow raise class consciousness among those who ostensibly don’t read (to reply to Mark Comerford’s podcast manifesto). That’s because the added value of such meetings comes from actual participation — the sense of belonging to something larger, and the fact that these meetings sometimes serve as decision-making opportunities. Listening to after-the-fact podcasts, on the other hand, is just as solitary an experience as reading or writing, and is not going to change the results of these meetings. You had to be there, so to speak. So to speak (haha).

(Not to mention that I believe the idea of class consciousness is no longer relevant. Class-based movements used to be a response to a lack of opportunities for social mobility in society. Ironically, labor movements today are trying to resist such mobility, favoring the protection of uncompetitive manufacturing jobs over retraining for jobs that have a much better competitive future. I put this down to a self-preservationist impulse on the part of labor unions, and the difficulty of letting go of mental constructs past their use-by date.)