Considerations—Reflections and Future Research. Everything Old is New Again: Podcasting as Radio's Revival

Abstract

I was excited to learn about this symposium on podcasting and be asked to serve as the discussant, because it marks what I hope will be the start of a sustained program of research on this subject. Numerous voices in the public discourse have announced that we are in a ‘‘golden age’’ of podcasting, as the author of the first article in this symposium eloquently notes (although I cannot help but to pause and reflect that ‘‘golden age’’ is a label usually attributed in retrospect). There are parallels in the trajectories of podcasting and its scholarship over the last decade. After an initial flurry of interest and excitement, podcasting and research into this phenomenon grew slowly but steadily. Perhaps the recent breakthrough success of the podcasts Welcome to Night Vale and Serial will prompt more scholars of new media and radio to turn their attention to podcasting scholarship. For while there are numerous points of intersection among these seven articles, they also point to many other lines of inquiry that are ripe for exploration. Taken together, the contributors of this symposium help highlight a convergence of factors that may explain why podcasting has (finally) arrived in mainstream consciousness. One of these factors is distinctly technological: the rise of smartphones and podcasting apps. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (2015b), 64% of American adults owned a smartphone in 2015, up from 35% in 2011 when they first started tracking smartphone ownership (Pew Research Center, 2015a). By contrast, Pew (2015a) found that only 20% of adults owned an MP3 player in 2006. For early adopters of podcasting, listening was frequently a manual process of finding, subscribing to, downloading, and uploading podcasts onto a