Experiments with media (or, iterating towards a podcast, maybe?)

I’ve been relatively silent over the past few months. This has mostly been for personal reasons, but the overall anxiety in both society and in the field of tech, specifically, has been a part of it.

Despite people’s common superstitions about the creative process, the tortured artist isn’t very productive and even a mild anxiety or burnout can throw much of your process into a tailspin.

But I have been thinking.

I’ve regularly noted that writing and text has lost its primacy as an information medium. The internet extended its life but, as Neil Postman and others noted in the 80s, “text” as a medium has not had a central role in our societies for decades at this point.

It’s for this reason that I’ve been, semi-regularly, brushing up on my very rusty media skills (I actually did a stint at film school and worked in TV and radio in my early twenties) and trying my hand at video.

I’ve finally gotten around to continuing those experiments but the break was useful in one regard:

Time to think gives you time to think.

(It may seem facetious to say something so obvious but sometimes you get so stuck inside your own head that you don’t see the obvious and stumbling on it becomes a genuine insight.)

My basic idea is that, for now, audio on it’s own is a better fit for somebody like me whose work is so heavy on prose.

There’s a reason why we have audiobooks but “videobooks” only exist as movies with multimillion dollar budgets. Audio matches many of the constraints of text as a medium. On its own it’s edited more like text than video. It’s more work than text but much less work on its own than video.

So, as a step towards expanding my media “footprint” I’ve been doing a few audio experiments with an eye towards podcasts.

I haven’t ruled out doing more video at some point, but if I decide to go in that direction then audio is likely to work as a useful foundation.

But I’ve resisted doing podcasts in the past for a very good reason:

I find them incredibly boring and tedious as a listener.

Dudes chatting aimlessly about a topic for a couple of hours, barely bothering to edit it down. It all seems targeted at the same demographic as live talk radio, except with even less charm and structure.

There are great podcasts, but they are usually the result of more work than just gathering a bunch of guys together on Zencastr. Sometimes its interviews. Sometimes it’s just a slightly more interesting group of people. Sometimes it’s more produced.

So, I’m working on a few ideas and on my processes. I’ve got an idea for a conversation/interview podcast but I’m also thinking about a format that tries to take a simple audio column and make it marginally more interesting.

None of this is working well at the moment but what follows is the first experiment that’s showing a bit more of a cohesive shape than my earlier ones.

It still isn’t quite working, but it’s starting to get interesting.

I wanted to test a few things in this experiment:

Whether a more vivid environment in the audio would help or hinder the message.

Would an unscripted but heavily edited in post episode result in a cohesive argument and a more “natural” sounding recording?

Would the basic technology work? (Microphones. Recorder. Wind protection.)

Would editing work on Linux? (Important for my workflow that I don’t have to boot up into Windows for work.)

How much work would it be to create accurate transcripts or captions (I may not be doing video but I could still upload audio as video)?

I think the results are mixed. I personally like hearing more of the environment, but the unscripted “stream of consciousness” argument ended up being unwieldy and the end result doesn’t quite work as well as I liked. The technology worked quite well. Editing on Linux was a doddle. Reaper worked quite well. It has a bit of a learning curve, as any media production app does, but after watching a few tutorials I found that it’s clearly designed with an understanding of the work people do with it. The transcripts turned out to be a lot of work, even with the help of one of the less offensive transcription models my pronunciation and accent regularly caused problems.

I’m not going to set up a podcast feed for this yet, not until I’ve got a better handle on the approach and format for this, but I will continue with the experiments until I settle on something.

I think for my next experiment I’ll try for something more scripted or even fully scripted. A fully scripted one would simplify transcription. I might try a different microphone. There are a few other aspects of this that I might change or adjust. But you can listen to the first experiment below and hear for yourself.

It’s only ten minutes or so.

And a transcript follows below that.

Listen to the podcast experiment:Download audio

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity) #

My name is Baldur Bjarnason. I work at the cross section between tech

and publishing and have been writing about it for over twenty five years. This is a podcast that is a bit of an experiment. As in, it’s unscripted but will be edited before publishing and the idea is that by editing what would be my first draft of something, we get the structure and argument and quality that you get from writing, but hopefully with a little bit of the spontaneity that you get with the first quick recording of an idea.

And I’m recording this outside largely because otherwise I’d be bored. It really isn’t more complicated than that. And if you listen you can hear parts of the town. The cliffs are just literally just over the town so you can probably hear people and hikers and you can hear the the street—the road—that goes by the town. Especially when you get this high. The obstructions that would usually dampen the sound of traffic you kind of go above them, so…

There’s less there’s less dirt between us and the road than there would be—than there is when we’re at ground level.

But what I want to talk about this time is… I’ve been pondering—I’ve been kind of obsessed with the notion of boredom or specifically the boredom that you get with important topics.

This is not a reaction to anybody in specific or anything particular because it’s kind of an observation on my end as well. Where I… I mean, one of the reasons why I don’t tackle “AI” as a topic, for example, that much any more, even though there’s no shortage of nonsense going on in that arena, is because I covered most of the core arguments that I have to make years ago. like, both in the book I wrote and in the in blog posts and newsletters – I even did a few interviews – and social media

And…

I keep following people, or reading people, reacting to yet another news story about “AI” or yet another argument pro or con “AI” and the same thing with politics, with climate change, and it’s… It is repetitive and it is boring! And it legitimately drains your attention. But…

There’s a tendency—there’s a risk there, that…

There’s a tendency to blame…

Well twofold: our attention has declined over the years that we are unable to focus like our our ancestors used to be able to focus. Or that social media is tapping into something primordial in our minds and that is sapping our ability to focus and read and take in information. Or that the younger generations are unable to or don’t know how to read and have have been let down by the education system but and now are basically feral children that are incapable of functioning within an information society or…

These narratives have a history and there’s reason why we… we keep referring back to them. Dating back to the era of Plato where he had a similar complaint about the youth of his time being unable to remember anything because of the innovation of writing, but what we forget is…

Well first of all…

Sometimes the worry is warranted.

But not in the way that you think. It’s not that…

It’s not an observation of a decline in the youth. It is… We are seeing a decline in the structural stability…