I feel a little ashamed admitting this, but it never occurred to me before reading this week that the term “podcast” came from downloading the audio files to an iPod. Maybe it’s because I never owned an iPod though, and because I don’t regularly listen to podcasts on any mobile device (or frequently, for that matter). More than anything, these readings made me think about different learning styles and choice of medium. I cannot learn effectively by listening to just an audio recording. Being in a room, seeing a presenter face-to-face, I can easily pay attention. But removed from that context, my attention wanders after roughly 5 minutes of pure audio. As an example, before Thanksgiving break, I downloaded an hour-long interview with Ann Hamilton on why she considers herself a “maker” rather than artist. I tried listening to it on my laptop over the weekend, but couldn’t concentrate. Wanting to hear the interview, I burned a CD and listened in the car while driving back to Lafayette, and easily absorbed the full podcast. Examples such as this cause me to question the line in Levy where he quotes Steve Jobs talking about iPods being something to listen to while driving instead of watching videos. Part of me wonders if this only happens because driving relies so heavily on visual attention. At the same time, when I was a kid and my mom would travel, she would record herself reading book chapters (she read to me nightly), and I could pay attention to those recordings by following along visually in the book. Perhaps this is the case for me because I struggle to think of a context where I’ve been conditioned to listen without some other sensory experience involved (visual, vocal, tactile, kinetic, etc.).

Secondarily, reading Gitelman and Levy, it seems that one of the overarching themes of this semester is how media emerge within particular social contexts, are predicted to be revolutionary across widespread contexts, and ultimately find a much smaller niche than predicted (word processing instruction, MOOs and MUDs, Second Life, etc.). That is, borrowing Gitelman’s phrase, any new media are “always already new.” So, I wonder if there’s any historical evidence regarding the attentiveness, or the ability of individuals to learn via telegraph, audio recording, etc.?