Probably against my better judgment, I am putting out a new podcast series. I’m three episodes in, and only now have I found the time to write something announcing it properly. But here I am. So my new podcast series is titled Media, Technology & Culture, which is hosted at my (new) podcast channel Publicly Sited. It takes a thematic look at media, understood as technologies, exploring both histories and more recent developments – and not always necessarily in a linear progression. It’s aimed principally at students in my second-year undergraduate module of the same name. But I am putting in out publicly as I think and hope it might be a useful resource to a broader range of users, or just an interesting listen to a wider audience.

The series is an idea I’ve been toying with for a long time, and well before the pandemic. Birkbeck students more often than not work during the day, and they’re generally very busy, with all kinds of extracurricular commitments and responsibilities. So I’ve long harboured the thought that, when we meet in the evening, in that valuable face-to-fact time, we might be able to be do things more creatively and practically if some of the main ideas could be presented succinctly in advance. And rather than that advance content being a video, I though a podcast would allow a wider range of listening options, such as during a commute or while washing up dishes. Hey, even if a student just sat and listened, maybe the medium of podcast might invite more reflection than video. No offence, Panopto.

So along comes the pandemic. Pre-session content is suddenly the norm. Do I pre-record video lectures, or put this podcast idea into action? I could see that the podcast option would be more work (a LOT more work). I could also see that I had a lot less time (a LOT less time). Plus, I’d also made the prospect somewhat higher stakes by getting it into my head that the podcast series should be put our publicly. I’m still not sure why I felt this had to be a condition.

Anyway, as I got to the end of December, I seemed to be internalising that I was going to do this. Little mini-narratives seemed to be forming in my head around how I might present stuff I’d taught in the past. Whenever I saw some interesting video, I found myself homing in on the sound, imagining how it might be used as an audio clip in an episode.

Now I’m three episodes in, and I’m honestly exhausted by the whole enterprise. Partly, it’s facing the prospective of pumping out an episode per week well into March. And yet…. It’s worth it, I think.

Media, Technology & Culture is not just a random module I’ve been assigned to teach. It has defined my time teaching at Birkbeck. I came to media from the outside, as it were, from a human geography background. This module has become a kind of ‘thinking object’ around which I have learned, with the help of my students, the many things that media and cultural studies has had to say about the question of ‘technology’.

So far, doing this podcast has been revealing. It has made visible where I’m at with the module and I guess with my thinking on this area of teaching. On the one hand, a positive is that I’ve realised that actually the session themes have evolved to a point where they are reasonably coherent. For each episode, I’ve set myself the task of taking a 1-2 sentence key idea, and then saying something coherent around that in under 30 minutes. At least for the first episodes (some of the later ones could prove more challenging) it’s been easier to achieve than I thought. I mean, still tons of work on recording, sampling sound clips and editing – but the actual script comes reasonably easy.

On the other hand, an anxiety-producing negative (but also, really still a positive) is that it’s made me recognise that blind spots I’ve long troubled over, and thought I’d made progress on, still remain and sometimes glaringly so. It’s not that I worry about covering everything. This module is aimed at second year undergraduates and exhaustion is not only out of the question but wouldn’t be helpful for my students. But on the whole the module still is not quite there when it comes to thinking about questions around identity, race and gender. These things are not at all absent, but there is still work to do.

This series is the first draft. I plan to update the podcast annually. Not a full re-recording, but edits and new additions (and also subtractions). Maybe next year I will actually compose proper intro music too, since what I have now is simply terrible. I’d welcome feedback, though, and please do use the episode as you see fit! Links to the first three are below.

Episode 1: Cultural Technologies

Episode 2: Communication Technologies

Episode 3: Domesticated Technologies