The terrible imprecision of podcasting
On a loose and inefficient form
The longest-ever episode of ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast, an interview with the comedian Duncan Trussell, lasts for five hours and nineteen minutes; presumably it’s only after the third hour that Joe really gets into his stride.
It remains to me on some basic level extraordinary that people can have any form of conversation for five hours. I don’t think I’ve even spoken to my wife for more than five hours at one time and we’ve been married over five years. The only conversation I could think of lasting for this length of time would be a police interrogation, working towards a confession, and I think even Joe Rogan would have cracked over that timespan.
It’s a particular challenge for me to comprehend such verbosity having spent ten years in Germany, where communication norms incline consistently towards the precise. I remember a friend telling me that he’d once been rung by a German relative who told him ‘David1, Opa ist gestorben. Wir treffen uns um 19.00 im Italiener.’ (‘David, Grandad has died; we’ll meet at 19.00 in the Italian restaurant.‘) I said, considered as a statement, your name is the only information that could be possibly considered unnecessary there. Your actual name is the only bit we could possibly cut out.
Today, we see an inflation of discussion everywhere; in endless online deep dives, in reactioncasts, in twenty minute YouTube videos which explain to you the ending of a film it is perfectly possible to understand by watching the film. Everywhere this endless loose, baggy talk.
These days the YouTube channels and YouTubers who present such content represent a cultural cannon for younger people – they’re the new stars and what young people aspire to; there is a community feel both to and around the likes of MrBeast or Miniminter and the way their channels bring people together to stage competitions or to distribute goods. Although there are still people interested in traditional forms in younger generations, the lengthy, real-time stream serves as a cultural default.
Clearly, watching someone engage in unstructured broadcasting while having an ability to communicate in real time with them is in some sense like actually hanging out with them, with the sole difference being there’s a public record of said hanging out. There’s also the small difference that the person solicits you for money every five minutes.
Research does show that increasing digital socializing correlates with decreasing IRL social contacts for younger people, or certainly removes the sense that such physical hang-outs are inherently superior. Has ‘Let’s go over to Sidemen’s channel’ replaced ‘Let’s see if Eddie’s playing’? Mind you, teenagers have always spent a fair amount of time in their bedrooms. I certainly did, and I can’t see that being on a YouTube channel as an active commenter would have been morally inferior to the endless gaming I did.
My objections to these long podcasts and steams are rather more on literary grounds; in terms of the writing I know best, comedy writing, most of these lengthy streams and podcasts fall, if you’ll pardon the pun, short. Not that humour isn’t attempted - it’s just in a way which very obviously uses comedy to fill time.
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