A couple of weeks ago, late at night while I was home on my own, all the power in my street went out. Since this was in Ireland during summer, a place where true night never arrives, I wasn’t plunged into total darkness but something close to it. I had stupidly let the battery on my various devices run down (I’m bad for that) and so couldn't watch videos on my phone or laptop; I had to stay up and wait for my wife, who didn’t have her keys. Long story short, the only way I had to occupy myself for the two or so hours of the outage was lying on the couch listening to podcasts. This drew my attention to something I have become increasingly aware of over the last few months but mostly don’t focus on, which is how many podcasts are unlistenable without the accompaniment of a distracting activity.
That’s alarming because on a day to day basis I spend more time and (I would have said) get more enjoyment out of podcasts than I do out of any other form of entertainment/ content; as with many other people they have become a ubiquitous feature of my life in the last decade and I would have said the only pure positive development to come out of the cultural dominance of phones. How do we square the circle between how much we enjoy podcasts on the one hand, with how objectively low quality, unsatisfying, and for the world in general they are on the other. There is probably no form of content that I participate in so regularly, with which I have such a conflicted relationship, other than video games - and that’s really saying something.
