Podcasting a Pandemic: Reporting from Station Eleven

Introduction One obstacle to building a classroom community is media content that has become extremely fragmented. There is so much new and niche content produced daily that there are fewer shared cultural texts, but it is through these shared texts (and experiences) that both students and instructors can find common topics of interest. Speaking in terms of emerging digital economies, Anderson (2004) noted that there has been a shift in media from the massmarket, hit-driven culture to one of niche entertainment. Or as he described it: the long tail. At the wider end of the tail are the mass-market hits—Friends, Grey’s Anatomy, Game of Thrones—and at the narrower end are indie content and content directed toward smaller, niche communities of consumers. In addition to television and movies, other media, such as podcasts, video games (whose narratives have become increasingly complex), YouTube, Vlogs, blogs, etc., have resulted in students having richer and more diverse and nuanced media and textual consumption than those of previous generations, but this fragmentation of content has also made it more difficult to build affinity spaces for engaged learning. Although media fragmentation has made it more difficult to find shared cultural texts, new media has fostered deeper engagement with texts, allowing students to interact with them beyond simply watching or listening at a prescribed time or place. By interacting with texts through multimodal genres and assignments, students begin to build toward an interdisciplinary understanding of—or ability to transfer—writing (or text production) and thinking skills. Identifying critical thinking as interdisciplinary understanding values a student’s