Category Archives: Culture: new media

Now that’s podcasting

First page of New York Times Business page today, there’s a column by David Pogue titled “An IPod [sic] Worth Keeping an Eye On.” Pogue writes in glowing terms about the new iPod with video screen, and claims it’s much cooler than it sounds. As in, that tiny screen has great resolution and looks pretty big when you hold it a couple of feet from your eyes.

And the iTunes Music Store already has video podcasts ready to download onto your new video iPod. Now that’s cool. I have kinda cooled on the audio podcast idea, but I like the idea of video podcasts.

The only downside that I can see is that some churches will start doing video podcasts consisting of unedited, one-camera videos of a worship service. That sounds horribly boring. But imagine a really rocking sermon recorded with a video montage of vaguely related images, music-video style — that’s something I might actually watch.

Is podcasting as cool as we thought?

When podcasting first burst on the scene about a year ago, I thought, Wow, this is going to be the coolest thing ever! I love radio — I used to do college radio and community radio, and I still listen to radio more than I watch TV — and I thought podcasting was going to be a way to do radio on the Web. So I listened to a few podcasts, even tried recording a couple myself, but my interest in podcasting quickly waned.

Podcasts lack the immediacy of radio. When I did college and community radio, people would call in to the station and talk to me — I loved that. I like to listen to the BBC World Service for breaking stories. I love listening to Click and Clack, the Tappit Brothers, on “Car Talk,” as they handle all the crazy phone calls they get. Because podcasts are pre-recorded, you don’t get that same sense of immediacy.

And podcasts are essentially a one-way medium. Your only choice is to turn it on or turn it off. Radio combined with the telephone has a far greater potential to be a two-way medium — listeners can call in and interact with the radio show.

So for now, I’m sticking to frequent blogging. It’s much more fun for me. I try to post daily, so I get that sense of immediacy. And I get fast feedback from my readers via comments, email, and face-to-face. But I’d be curious to hear from readers of this blog –do you listen to podcasts? –which do you prefer, and why?

Saturday

Ferry Beach Conference Center, Saco, Maine

I was hanging out last night with some people from a music conference who were doing a little impromptu singing. One of them wanted to sing “Ode to Billie Joe,” originally recorded by Bobby Gentry, but no one could quite remember the lyrics. So they turned to the laptop that one of them had brought and did a quick search of the Web to find the lyrics….

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door “y’all remember to wipe your feet”
And then she said “I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge”
“Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge”

One of the musicians later said how pleased he was to be able to sit around and play music that was not electronic. And none of the instruments, none of the voices, was electronically altered in any way. But I’m in a postmodern, deconstructionist mood today, and very interested in how finding song lyrics on the Web alters the reality of folksinging.

Which makes me think about something else. In the next room over from where I’m sitting, there’s a workshop going on. Although I can’t hear much, I can tell from the rhythms and tones of the voices, by how many people get to speak at once, by the occasional bursts of polite laughter, that this workshop is using techniques of group process that grew out of the ferment of 1970’s pedagogy and group work — the human potential movement, second wave feminist group process, and so on. They are using, in fact, the same techniques I typically use when I lead small groups.

But in my present deconstructionist mood, I’m questioning whether those techniques still match the reality of our lives (almost definitely not). And wondering whether we can reconstruct new ways of teaching and learning that move beyond the tight limitations that I have begun to see in those old group process techniques. And thinking that teaching and learning are even more limited than I had ever thought.

Hey, just call me a postmodern kind of guy.

Dream big, bloggers

A couple of days ago, I was idly browsing the Web, looking at different blogs. Generally speaking, people have a very limited conception of what might go on a blog. Personal confession and strident political commentary seem to be the dominant content in blogs, with a very few people experimenting with other genres of writing. I’m especially interested in “place blogs,” where the author of the blog gives you little portraits of where he or she lives. I like writer’s blogs, too, especially where the writer posts work in progress.

But imagine if Charles Dickens were alive today. I think a blog would be a great format for some of his novels, which after all were serialized when they first appeared. Which got me to thinking about blogs I’d like to see….

  • A blog written by a fictional character about his/her fictional life.
  • A blog by a real person about his/her travels in a fictional place.
  • A blog of literary or arts reviews (by multiple authors).
  • A “historical blog,” written from the point of view of a historical figure as if s/he were blogging in her/his own era, a sort of blog re-enactment; e.g., a Plimoth Plantation blog, a Civil War soldier’s blog, etc.
  • A blogicization of Dante’s Inferno, or Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, etc.
  • Or best of all, something that’s just plain new and different.

Strident commentary and personal soul-baring have barely begun to tap the potential of blogs. Dream big, bloggers.

12 days of magic…

Though I don’t have time to experiment with online audio for the foreseeable future, while I was packing up some things for our move to Massachusetts I ran across the project that initially made me aware of what you could do with religion and audio.

A year ago, I was serving temporarily as minister of religious education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, California. The facilites supervisor there was a fellow named Mark Johnson, a talented musician and visual artist, who had a degree in film studies (now you know why he was working as a faciltities supervisor — no money in the arts).

Mark was a Pentecostal, I a Unitarian Universalist, and our religions overlapped in three crucial areas — the importance of Spirit, integrating religion and the arts, and trying to get kids interested in our religious heritage. So one Sunday he recorded a chidlren’s story I did in the worship service, cleaned up the sound, and added a beat and sound effects to it. We put in a minimal amount of time — it took me a few hours to prepare the story but I would have had to do that anyway, and it took Mark about an hour and a half to produce the recording — but in spite of that the results were pretty good. Check out a compressed mp3 version of “12 days of magic” here. It’s the wrong season, but hey….

We talked idly about producing other stories from the Christian tradition, trying to produce something children and youth might actually listen to. But Mark had a new baby in his life, and I moved here to Geneva, Illinois, so we never got around to it.

But wouldn’t that be cool? I mean, podcasts of sermons are fine and good, but they’re kinda boring. The UUA’s “Drive Time” recordings are well-produced and fine for church geeks like me and boring for most people. But wouldn’t it be fun to do something with a little more… pizzazz?

Just throwing the idea out there, hoping someone picks up on it.

Sense of place

As I continue to explore ecological theology, I get more and more interested in the notion of place. A sense of place is essential to understanding how we humsn fit into the rest of the ecosystem.

So this blog, called Where Project, caught my eye: www.whereproject.org Later note: I removed the link because this Web site is now defunct.

It’s written and photographed by a PhD candidate in English at Boston College, who’s writing a dissertation on “place blogging” — blogs that are all about one person’s relationship to one place.

Update August 2006: This blog is no longer current, although the author keeps promising to update it.