Recently I've been looking more at podcasts and although some source says 50% of the Americans are fans of podcasts, I can't really see why. I haven't browsed too many of them, but they seem uninteresting - sorta like radio programmes. Now, this may be because I'm a reader, but... I was curious if there is someone here who finds them quite useful (and for what).

Also, recently, there's this craziness of adding the average time one takes to read a text under each blog post/article etc. This is a 3 minute read, this one is 12 min read...I understand where it's coming from, but with a rush towards brevity in blogging, twittering, podcasting etc, I think MD must seem like a torture to young players. I mean, not only you need to read (at times a lot), but you need patience, too. Hang around some dudes for a couple of years to get your hands on research? How about no, a new player would say. Give it to me, give it to me fast and give it to me now. Childish, but it's the trend.

It is rather simple what they are useful for, entertainment mostly. The idea of a podcast is that they are an audio-only format generally, even with videos the video itself is irrelevant. This helps for people who are doing other things they need to visually focus on, often people cite they will listen to a podcast on the commute to work.

Why podcasts are attractive to me has to do with that average time. I prefer long-form content over clips like tik-tok or youtube shorts. If I'm browsing youtube I hardly find a reason to click a video under 10 minutes, when I find videos like that I feel as though I spend more time trying to find the next video to watch than I do watching the videos and that is just a waste of time. Podcasts remedy that.

Yeah there is a trend in people wanting short-form content, anything from movies being 60-90 minutes at most to mobile games meant to be played periodically in short bursts. It makes some sense in the context of long work/study hours mixed with new technology that people want to pay attention to but have little time to do so.

 

On 9/8/2021 at 8:27 PM, Mallos said:

I prefer long-form content

I think you're not part of the majority, though

that's interesting stuff you posted; thanks for leaving a reply ehre

Podcasts are good as far as language learning is concerned. Haven´t used them for any other subject yet.

Good point on the brevity thereof. People of today, especially the young ones, seem to get frustrated in front of a more-than-ten-minutes video-episode. Data devourers really, they´ve got to consume all available info as fast as possible.

I guess they are useful like that (although you have to get your hands on books anyway)