Abstract
In recent years, there has been a growing area of research focused on points of convergence between scientific and humanities discourses, with ecology and ecological modes receiving special attention. This chapter examines an ecological framework evidenced in the podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind, exploring how, both theoretically and practically, podcasting can be used to engage complex ecological concepts. Analysing Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the broader context of the conversational science podcast, this chapter examines podcasting’s surprising potential to challenge top-down and linear logics, to diverge toward a more complex ecological epistemology, and to express network relations as they play out within the living systems of cultural products.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Lamb, Joe McCormick and Christian Saeger, Stuff to Blow Your Mind (Atlanta, GA: HowStuffWorks, 2010), www.stufftoblowyourmind.com
- 2.
George Monbiot is a zoologist and environmental columnist for The Guardian, as well as author of a number of books on the subject of ecology and conservation. Feral won the 2013 Thomson Reuters Award for Communicating Zoology and the 2014 Society of Biology Book Award. Monbiot was also a recipient of the UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, presented by Nelson Mandela. His influential 2013 ‘Manifesto for Rewilding the World’ makes an impassioned argument for an approach to nature that is ‘about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world’ in exchange for what he terms ‘positive environmentalism.’ George Monbiot, ‘My Manifesto for Rewilding the World,’ The Guardian 27 May 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/27/my-manifesto-rewilding-world
- 3.
The philosophy of restoring ecological diversity to humans as well as environments is based on the writings of leading ecologists and anthropologists including E.O. Wilson and Spencer Wells. See also David Foreman, Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004); Michael Soule and Reed Noss, ‘‘Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation,’’ Wild Earth 8 (1998): 18–28.
- 4.
George Monbiot, Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (London: Penguin UK, 2013), loc. 202–255. Monbiot, ‘Manifesto.’
- 5.
For more on the ‘conversational’ science podcast, see Hayley Birch and Emma Weitkamp, ‘Podologues: conversations created by science podcasts,’ New Media & Society 12(6) (2010): 889–909. For a concise overview of the development of the genre of science podcasts, see Ilenia Picardi and Simona Regina, ‘Science via podcast,’ Journal of Science Communication 7(2) (2008): 2–4.
- 6.
You can find the episode archive for STBYM at http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/stbym-archive.htm. STBYM is one of a network of podcasts produced by the How Stuff Works website. At its time of inception in the early 2000s it was a fairly simple website with posts demystifying various topics; it is now a multimedia group owned by Biucora, Ltd. publishing the website as well as 16 podcasts and ten blogs, and covering various educational topics. The evolution of the organisation is a perfect example of changes in information culture more broadly: as our media diet has grown richer, so has the variety of ways in which we access and create information, with podcasting as a principal example of media which is conversational and user-driven.
- 7.
Asif Agha, ‘Registers of language’, in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (2004): 23–45.
Jauert & Lowe argue that podcasting does not have the same well-defined listener position, tending to position listeners as interested in ‘enlightenment’, similar to traditional public service radio. Per Jauert and Gregory Ferrell Lowe, ‘Public Service Broadcasting for Social and Cultural Citizenship’, in Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005): 13–17.
- 8.
Mariam Durrani, Kevin Gotkin, and Corrina Laughlin, ‘‘Serial, Seriality, and the Possibilities for the Podcast Format,’’ American Anthropologist 117(3) (2015): 1–4.
- 9.
McCormick differentiates the written from the spoken knowledge unit, claiming that
the main difference between preparation for a podcast and work on an article is that our podcasts are both collaborative and conversational. So on a podcast, I don’t necessarily have to familiarize myself with everything that’s going to be covered in the final product. Robert might read about one thing and I’ll read about another, and then we sort of tell each other about it.
Danielle Barrios-O’Neill, Interview with Joe McCormick and Robert Lamb (2017) (see Appendix).
- 10.
Ibid., [Appendix].
- 11.
Whether the hosts’ assumptions about information explicated on the show are reductive (or even at times incorrect), interesting and worthwhile avenues open up. Notably, the hosts and producers are well aware of this fact, judging by the way that perception and interpretation of scientific materials are subjects that come up regularly, as an issue to be treated critically (see, for example, 17 January 2017 episode ‘Scientific Reductionism,’ Stuff to Blow Your Mind (7 February 2017), accessed at http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/scientific-reductionism.htm).
- 12.
For a discussion of how paratextual material influences contemporary forms across media boundaries with regard to the series format, see Alan Hook, Danielle Barrios-O’Neill & Jolene Mairs Dyer, ‘‘A Transmedia Topology of ‘Making a Murderer’,’’ VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 5(10) (2016): 124–139, http://ojs.viewjournal.eu/index.php/view/article/view/JETHC117/244
- 13.
The term prosumer was coined by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (New York: Bantam books, 1981) and has since been adopted into discourses in marketing, media studies and a wide range of other disciplines. ‘Prosumerism’ describes the rise of do-it-yourself production and consumption, which have become increasingly normal in the post-computing era.
- 14.
Hook et al., ‘Transmedia Topology’, 2016.
- 15.
Levine, Forms, 23. Mackenzie Wark, also focusing on the lack of discernible teleology, argues that this style of narrativity (‘as horizontal as a pipeline’) is a precursor to capitalist realism: the story is ‘about making something out of this world, not transcending it in favor of another.’ Mackenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London, UK: Verso Books, 2015): 185–7.
- 16.
From Interview (2017): JM: ‘It also does help create the sense that the HSW podcast universe is not just a list of shows, but sort of an intellectual ecosystem.’ [Appendix].
- 17.
Ibid., [Appendix].
- 18.
For more on operational aesthetics in media, see Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television storytelling (New York, US: NYU Press, 2015), loc. 880–1192.
- 19.
Matt Tierney, What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014): 10, 39.
- 20.
The use of formal or technical language in relation to science and technology is a factor frequently cited as obfuscating information and alienating audiences; see for example Sebastian Krätzig & Bartlett Warren-Kretzschmar, ‘Using Interactive Web Tools in Environmental Planning to Improve Communication about Sustainable Development’ in Sustainability 2014, 6(1): 236–250.
- 21.
Cheryl Geisler, Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2013). Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Boston: MIT Press, 2010): 281.
- 22.
Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015): 81.
- 23.
Tierney, What Lies Between, 20.
- 24.
See for example: Kerry Dwan, Carrol Gamble, Paula R. Williamson, and Jamie J. Kirkham, ‘Systematic review of the empirical evidence of study publication bias and outcome reporting bias—an updated review,’ PloS one 8(7) (2013); Mark Peplow, ‘Social sciences suffer from severe publication bias,’ Nature (28 August 2014), https://www.nature.com/news/social-sciences-suffer-from-severe-publication-bias-1.15787
- 25.
For specific enquiries into the politics of scientific writing, see for example Charles Leslie, ‘Scientific racism: Reflections on peer review, science and ideology’, Social Science & Medicine 31(8) (1990): 891–905; Malcolm N. Macdonald, ‘Pedagogy, pathology and ideology: the production, transmission and reproduction of medical discourse’, Discourse & Society 13(4) (2002): 447–467; Ding, Dan. ‘Marxism, ideology, power and scientific and technical writing’ in Journal of technical writing and communication 28(2) (1998): 133–161; Paul M. Dombrowski, ‘Ethics and technical communication: The past quarter century’ in Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 30(1) (2000): 3–29.
- 26.
From Christie Wilcox, ‘It’s time to e-volve: taking responsibility for science communication in a digital age’:
Right now, science is almost entirely a monologue given to a very specific audience. As scientists, we pride ourselves on doing meaningful, cutting-edge research and publishing it in the top-tier journals of our field. The problem is, these publications only communicate science to other scientists. Articles are locked behind paywalls, and even those that are published in open access journals still lie behind jargon walls—the barriers that keep the people we want to become more scientifically literate from understanding what we do because they do not know the terminology.
Biological Bulletin 222(2) (2012): 86, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/BBLv222n2p85
- 27.
Margaret Bradley and Peter J. Lang, ‘Affective reactions to acoustic stimuli,’ Psychophysiology 37(2) (2000): 204–215.
- 28.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New Edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994): 298.
- 29.
Richard Berry argues:
What has changed since podcasting began is that podcasters have developed aesthetics that are notably different to linear radio. … podcasts have developed definite features that are distinct from … podcasting … offers, in many instances, a sense of ‘hyper-intimacy’. Podcasts are listened to in an intimate setting (headphones), utilizing an intimate form of communication (human speech). Furthermore, in many cases, podcasts are presented by people from within a listener’s own community of interest or by people she/he may already have a relationship with via social media and are frequently recorded in a podcaster’s own personal or domestic space.
Berry, ‘Part of the establishment: Reflecting on 10 years of podcasting as an audio medium’, in Convergence 22(6) (2016): 666.
- 30.
Lars Nyre found that subjects of a study found BBC podcasts difficult to listen to on the move, as they found they were ‘too authoritative in tone’ and ‘this type of content requires enhanced concentration’. Nyre, ‘Urban headphone listening and the situational fit of music, radio and podcasting,’ Journal of Radio & Audio Media 22(2) (2015): 295.
- 31.
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 303.
- 32.
Marie-France Kouloumdjian, ‘Le walkman et ses pratiques, rapport de recherché,’ Multigraphie (Lyon: Center for National Scientific Research, 1985): 16.
- 33.
Thibaud , Jean Paul, ‘The Sonic Composition of the City’, in M. Bull and L. Black (Eds) The Auditory Culture Reader (London: Berg, 2003): 329–342.
- 34.
See for example Jatin Srivastava, ‘Media multitasking performance: Role of message relevance and formatting cues in online environments’, Computers in Human Behavior 29(3) (2013): 888–895.
- 35.
The relationship between auditory processing and complexity is a compelling area spanning a number of disciplines, and much of this body of work suggests that this is a productive relationship; a 1999 study found, for example, that ‘audio cues can provide useful information about processes and problems, and support the perceptual integration of a number of separate processes into one complex one.’ William Gaver, Randall B. Smith, and Tim O’Shea, ‘Effective sounds in complex systems: The ARKola simulation’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 1991): 85–90.
- 36.
The phrase ‘screen of sound’ I borrow from McLuhan, who writes,
So much do-it-yourself, or completion and ‘closure’ of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible. The mystic screen of sound with which they are invested by their radios provides … privacy … and immunity from parental behest. (303)
- 37.
Jean-Paul Thibaud describes how
Using a walkman in public places is part of an urban tactic which consists in decomposing the territorial structure of the city and recomposing it through spatio-phonic behaviors. Double movement of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. This new urban nomad is here and there at the same time, transported by the secret rhythm of his walkman and in direct contact with the place he’s walking through.
Thibaud , ‘The Sonic Composition of the City’ in The Auditory Culture Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2003): 330.
- 38.
William J. Ripple, Robert L. Beschta, Jennifer K. Fortin, and Charles T. Robbins, ‘Trophic cascades from wolves to grizzly bears in Yellowstone,’ Journal of Animal Ecology 83, no. 1 (2014): 223–233.
- 39.
E. Borer, E. Seabloom, J. Shurin, K. Anderson, C. Blanchette, B. Broitman, and B. Halpern, ‘What determines the strength of a trophic cascade?’ in Ecology, 86 no. 2 (19): 528–537.
- 40.
Monbiot, Feral, loc 226.
- 41.
As for preparation, McCormick describes it as ‘very uncomplicated and informal’:
I’d say the most common route looks like this: Robert and I email each other saying, ‘Hey, have you ever read about X? I was thinking that could be interesting for an episode.’ Then we bat the idea back and forth a little bit …. If we decide to move forward with it, we begin to collect and share resources for research. We create a shared Google document and paste in ideas, citations, links and so forth. We share any books or PDFs we have that the other might want to read. Then we go to work creating an outline for the episode in the shared document and filling it with notes from our research. The episodes are not scripted, but we do work from notes created in our shared document, so what you hear in the end is a mixture of comments we prepared ahead of time and spontaneous, free-flowing conversation.
Interview, 2017, [Appendix].
- 42.
Lamb explains how ‘discoveries in the research force you to restructure.’ Ibid., [Appendix].
- 43.
Levine, Forms, 18. Lorri G. Nandrea, Misfit Forms (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015): 3. The incipient species or forms that Nandrea traces include, for instance, direct relationships between typology and affect in Jane Eyre, an alternative plotting structure in Robinson Crusoe, and the functions of wonder and negative capability in novels by Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens.
- 44.
Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010): 26.
- 45.
Morton argues for a very particular ecological innovation in the arts, a new aesthetic that is primarily ambient, ‘oozes’, ‘drifts’ and wanders relatively aimlessly, like a dust mote or a jellyfish. Morton , Ecological Thought, 102–7, 125.
- 46.
Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
- 47.
Says McCormick,
We’re not always well-versed in the topic before we begin researching for an episode, so often we don’t know what there is to know until we get into the weeds. Some new tangents and subtopics come into focus; some ideas we had in the beginning turn out to be dead ends. So the final structure and contents of the episode is really more an emergent product of our research and reading than anything else.
Interview, 2017, [Appendix].
- 48.
Importantly, this trend is linked to increasingly powerful methods for using and manipulating data in the sciences, which enables more effective intuitive modelling methods. In ‘Equipping scientists for the new biology,’ the authors describe ‘discovery science,’ as cataloguing the elements of a system without any hypotheses on how it works. Hypothesis-driven science is described as being smaller-scale, narrowly focused, and using a limited range of technologies. See Ruedi Aebersold, Leroy E. Hood, and Julian D. Watts, ‘Equipping scientists for the new biology’ in Nature Biotechnology 18, no. 4 (2000): 359–359. So-called ‘Bayesian’ or ‘frequentist’ systems of analysis arrived in the 1960s, with the arrival of modern computing technologies. For a seminal description see Jerome Cornfield, ‘Bayes theorem’ in Revue de L’Institut International de Statistique (The Hague: SI World Statistics Congress, 1967): 34–49. A related change is the increasing use of Bayesian inference in statistical scientific analysis, which operates with the understanding that, unlike in a more orthodox view of scientific sampling, everything can be treating as a probability, and outcomes are always open to updating—effectively a statistical method that poses every conclusion as a draft. Again, this is an intuitive approach to data, where the model is created to fit the data rather than vice versa.
- 49.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 42.
- 50.
N. Katherine Hayles, ed. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 25–27, 31–34.
- 51.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 42.
- 52.
Robert Lamb, Joe McCormick and Christian Saeger, ‘So Cute I Could Eat You Up’, Stuff to Blow Your Mind (Atlanta, GA: HowStuffWorks, 2015). http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/so-cute-i-could-eat-you-up.htm. Robert Lamb, Joe McCormick and Christian Saeger, ‘Sexbots: From Objectification to Therapeutic Surrogates’, Stuff to Blow Your Mind (Atlanta, GA: HowStuffWorks, 2017). http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/sexbots.htm
- 53.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 42.
- 54.
Interview, 2017, [Appendix].
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Appendix
Appendix
Interview with Joe McCormick and Robert Lamb
This interview was carried out by email in November 2016.
-
How do you identify a strong potential idea for a podcast? What topics (or kinds of topics) lend themselves well to the format? Why?
- JM :
-
When I suggest a topic, the most important thing is that it has to be interesting to me. If I wouldn’t want to listen to a podcast on a subject, I don’t think I should try to make one on that subject. One reason for this (in addition to the obvious) is that the audio presentation format of podcasting is one in which a lack of enthusiasm on the host’s part will usually be palpable to the listener, making a boring and dreary final product. So the topics we choose are largely an extension of the hosts’ personalities. I personally have a credo for the show that I like to keep in mind: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is about helping people feel the weirdness of reality. The real world, in a way that is to a great extent explicable by scientific investigation, is reliably much stranger and more surprising than we imagine. Bringing people to that point of recognition is the core of what we do.
Also, I try not to chase news, big headlines or topics that seem like they ‘should’ be covered because of timeliness or societal impact. People don’t come to us for science news. There’s plenty of news coverage elsewhere. They come to us to have a thought-provoking experience grounded in a respect for science and an appetite for the weirdness of reality.
As for which topics lend themselves well to the format, one constraint is that there is no visual aid, so we also tend to skew toward topics that make for good conversation without the need for diagrams or illustrations. I think this does mean we end up talking about things like biology and the social sciences more often than things like chemistry or materials science. Sometimes there’s just not an easy way we know of to have an interesting conversation about synthetic polymer research. But we do sometimes try to find interesting ways to talk about the ‘dry’ sciences – because I think the truth is that any of it can be interesting if you just find the right approach.
- RL :
-
Well, first and foremost Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast. In fact, it was known as ‘Stuff From the Science Lab’ in its earliest incarnation (I was joined by co-host Allison Loudermilk back then). So there always has to be a firm grounding in science or scientific thinking, though the show is at its best when it pulls in philosophical, historical, mythological and/or psychological concepts as well. I like to think of this as a triangulation of truth. Plus, I really try to stress the value of keeping one’s mind open to varying and even conflicting worldviews and beliefs.
-
Is there anything you don’t cover at all in terms of topics for podcast episodes? Anything you have categorically decided against?
- JM :
-
Not that I can think of. The core of the show is science, but if you’ve listened for a while, I’m sure you’ve noticed that we don’t hesitate to range far and wide over history, religion, mythology, culture, literature, and of course all of the monster movies. I suppose we try to keep the show basically PG in that we avoid unnecessary vulgarity and foul language, but at the same time, we don’t shy away from ‘adult’ topics. There are probably some topics that we would never cover, not because we have a rule against them, but simply because they don’t fit our interests or the voice of the show. We’re probably not going to be doing episodes about football or how to get a small business loan (as much as I’m sure some advertisers would like that).
I guess maybe one thing is that we try not to get too overtly political on the show. I think all three of us have fairly similar political viewpoints and our values probably do come through just in the topics we choose to talk about and how we treat them, but we usually try to avoid stuff like direct discussion of political candidates and so forth.
- RL :
-
As long as we’re able to keep at least one foot firmly placed on the ground with a scientific/skeptical mindset, we can tackle just about anything. I try to keep in mind younger listeners more, especially as I have a young son now, but this hasn’t prevented us from engaging some darker topics such as necrophilia. That’s a great example of an episode that worked because we put a lot of effort into demystifying it – reaching through the miasma of cultural revulsion to grasp the truth.
-
Obviously your work as a writer/editor for HSW overlaps considerably with the development of podcasts. Could you characterize the ways in which it might differ?
- JM :
-
I don’t write or edit for HSW all that often these days, though I sometimes write pieces for HowStuffWorks Now. Really, I think my approach to research is not especially different whether I’m writing an article or preparing for a podcast. Either way, I want to spend enough time with research materials that I have plenty of relevant facts in hand, but also so I can get a ‘feel’ for the subject. How do people in this subject area talk about their work? What questions are of interest to them? Etc. I think the main difference between preparation for a podcast and work on an article is that our podcasts are both collaborative and conversational. So on a podcast, I don’t necessarily have to familiarize myself with everything that’s going to be covered in the final product. Robert might read about one thing and I’ll read about another, and then we sort of tell each other about it. With an article (or a video script, which I also write), you’re pretty much on your own.
- RL :
-
In the early days of HSW podcasting (I started on this show 7 years ago), we were all writers and editors and the show topics were all, in theory, spinoffs from articles we wrote and edited for HowStuffWorks.com. Over the years, priorities have changed, but I still try to approach each topic as a writer. So the methodology is much the same, but generally with less of a focus on creating a perfect, idealized expression. The podcast product is a clay tablet etching.
-
Could you describe the development process for a single episode or topic? How much does the structure and content of an episode change, from the conception of the idea to the final moment of going live?
- JM :
-
Sure. Every episode is different, but most of the time the process is very uncomplicated and informal. I’d say the most common route looks like this: Robert and I email each other saying, ‘Hey, have you ever read about X? I was thinking that could be interesting for an episode.’ Then we bat the idea back and forth a little bit and weigh it against any other ideas we have in the queue. If we decide to move forward with it, we begin to collect and share resources for research: We create a shared Google document and paste in ideas, citations, links and so forth. We share any books or PDFs we have that the other might want to read. Then we go to work creating an outline for the episode in the shared document and filling it with notes from our research. The episodes are not scripted, but we do work from notes created in our shared document, so what you hear in the end is a mixture of comments we prepared ahead of time and spontaneous, free-flowing conversation.
The structure and content of the episode often changes a lot during the research phase. We’re not always well-versed in the topic before we begin researching for an episode, so often we don’t know what there is to know until we get into the weeds. Some new tangents and subtopics come into focus; some ideas we had in the beginning turn out to be dead ends. So the final structure and contents of the episode is really more an emergent product of our research and reading than anything else.
- RL :
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A lot of it is organic and unformalised at this point. You just develop an idea for the general shape and flow of an episode and push for that. Then, discoveries in the research force you to restructure sometimes.
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What various forms of feedback from listeners might feed into your development of topic concepts or episodes?
- JM :
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Listener feedback from Facebook, Twitter and email can and does inform future episodes. We get a lot of great correspondence, and we have based episodes in the past on suggestions from listeners. The most common is probably from email, where people have room to express themselves at length. I think the quality of interaction we get on Facebook is a little bit lower than what we get over email and Twitter – though I don’t want to impugn the excellence of our very smart and gracious listeners who contact us through FB messenger. Facebook just seems to be the noisiest platform. There’s a lot happening on it, and not all of it is incredibly coherent. Twitter is a great platform for connecting with fans, but a lot of our interaction on Twitter could be better characterized as appreciation and reference-sharing. I think we get our best topic suggestions over email. Not a lot happens in blog comments.
- RL :
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All of it helps, though e-mail remains the best connection with listeners IMO.
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Your podcasts have grown substantially in terms of audience in recent years. Do you have any opinions as to why? In other words, is there a societal reason for it?
- JM :
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I would love to imagine that we’re gaining subscribers from a wave of new interest in science and in the weirdness of reality, but I don’t think I have any evidence to support that idea. I think the actual reasons might be more mundane, though still encouraging. A lot of people are buying mobile devices and stocking up their podcast apps with subscriptions to things that sound cool. Also, I think we make loyal subscribers, and that helps us as well – while we’re adding all of these new subscribers, we’ve also still got lots of listeners who have been with us for many years, and we hear from them all the time. Beyond that, I honestly don’t know exactly what is driving our growth. I hope it means we’re doing something right!
- RL :
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I can’t speak for all podcasts, because you have so many varieties – tightly-produced radio show productions, casual conversational podcasts, music podcasts, etc. But I think the core HSW model for podcasting continues to resonate because it is an informed conversation that the user may listen in on – and then they can even engage in it, by spinning the content off into their own conversations, host interactions and artistic expressions.
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In what ways do the various themes/podcasts in the HSW network work together, to achieve something bigger than the sum of the parts? You have a huge amount of content now – is this better?
- JM :
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The full roster of HSW podcasts are differentiated by both approach and at least nominally by subject. So on STBYM we’re probably not going to end up covering the same topic as a CarStuff episode, but being sort of scientific generalists, we often end up covering some of the same topics as Josh and Chuck on SYSK. However, whenever that has happened, I can’t recall that we’ve ever had shared listeners complain about it – I think people seem to appreciate the two different perspectives. Podcast hosts at HSW sometimes go on each other’s shows to talk about topics that are of particular interest to them. A while back I went on Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know to talk about Gnosticism, which was a great fit. I was able to have another outlet for my interest in ancient religion, and Gnosticism has many elements in common with modern conspiracy theories. So hopefully stuff like this does help us bring listeners from one HSW show on board to others. It also does help create the sense that the HSW podcast universe is not just a list of shows, but sort of an intellectual ecosystem. Working in the same office, the hosts of different shows are going to be hearing and talking about many of the same ideas in editorial brainstorm meetings and interacting with one another a lot. Sometimes we hear from listeners of a surprisingly diverse set of different HSW podcasts. I’m sure one day soon we’ll do an episode about fractal demonology or something and we’ll get an email from a listener who says, ‘This reminds me of something I heard on a recent episode of Stuff Mom Never Told You…’ These types of interactions suggest that at least some people are tuning in rather omnivorously for the general HSW vibe, rather than just signing up for a show with a particular type of subject matter. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to add even more shows to the HSW podcast ecosystem – I know there’s still plenty of room to grow.
- RL :
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The HSW mission has always been to demystify, inform and entertain – and the podcasts as they stand today continue to reflect that.
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Barrios-O’Neill, D. (2018). Wild Listening: Ecology of a Science Podcast. In: Llinares, D., Fox, N., Berry, R. (eds) Podcasting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90056-8_8
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