History through Podcast

Podcasts are not something that I ever have gravitated towards. I am a visual person, so just listening to something that has no visuals is extremely hard for me to do. That being said the assignment to listen to the podcast S-Town was probably the most challenging assignment I’ve had in my digital media class all year. The context around this podcast, the concept of digital bubbles is certainly something that just listening to the podcast made me aware of since it was the first podcast I had ever listened to and changed me to go out of my own bubble and experience podcasts. (Although I must admit it was extremely hard for me to retain anything that was said so I did have to read the transcripts to make sure I knew what was going on).

Since I do not have any other experience with podcasts I tried to come up with something else I know that would help me best classify what was being done with in S-town and I believe that the best thing I could compare this podcast to is an oral History. Especially because John B. is deceased and the majority of the podcast becomes the search for who he was and why he was the way he was. The podcast used John’s own voice postmortem to give the listener a since of his person and the voices of those who knew him add to the person he once was and enable his essence to continue to survive even after his suicide. Like an Oral History S-town is not so much concerned with the facts of the matter but more so with the feelings and what may seem insignificant events of John B’s life. This podcast seems more to me like a way of recording of stories of the past in order to preserve John and the Shittown that he lived in then a narrative that is trying to answer a question like the podcast is initial set up to make you believe is the case. After having listened to this Podcast I feel as if I know more about who John B was though all the antidotes and even the conversations with him then I would if someone had just read me a list of all the factual occurrences in his life. I do believe that there are some ethical qualms about using conversations with John B. postmortem especially when they are used to make a point that someone else is trying to convey about who they knew John to be, however the entire practice of Oral history is to record the stories of an individual and John himself did agree to be recorded on all the tapes that there are with him so this moral qualm is more of a grey area then a black and white issue.