Sound, Self and Crisis: Mapping the Affective Dimensions of Podcast Media

Since its renaissance in 2014, podcasting has become an emerging object of interest for media scholars. Most podcasting studies to date comfortably place the medium within rhetorics of access, participation, and democracy. However, these perspectives tend to analyse podcasting from an informational perspective, ignoring the more embodied, ambient, and affective practices underpinning the medium. Using close interviews with podcast listeners conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, this thesis argues that podcasting is employed by listeners as a tool of personal affect-management. For some participants, podcasts were a cheap and easy means for achieving a sense of personal comfort and control, serving as a kind of mediated emotional self-care. For other participants, podcast hosts became like friends to listeners stuck indoors due to Covid-19 restrictions, providing sociality in a physically distanced landscape. The informal, conversational, and aural properties of the medium also helped listeners to understand themselves as subjects in the world, by defining themselves in relation to the voices they were listening to. In any case, podcasting’s overriding value, both in the pandemic and contemporary life, lies not necessarily in its unifying properties, but instead, its individual affective impact. This thesis constitutes both an interrogation of techno-deterministic perspectives on digital media, and an affective model for theorising the fast-growing medium of podcasting in future research.