Article Title: Friends of the Pod

Article Summary

The article at hand reflects on the growing popularity of podcasts, and on what that means for modern lifestyles and intellectual situations. It starts off by saying that the contemporary world is forever online, and would rather be that way. Since visual content can’t be consumed when doing other work, podcasts, being auditory content, feed the craze of 24*7 Internet by being suitable for consumption when multitasking. Podcast galleries are comprehensive as well, with content spanning almost all topics of contemporary cultural interest. Podcasts, note the authors, do not have a sensational effect on you – they instead soothe you, and become indispensable parts of ordinary lives. They take the place of friends in people’s lives, companionable and private – and the authors wonder if tech taking that place can be any good at all. Podcasts are either extremely over or under curated, and end up providing humans with the same saturation they claim to provide relief from. Most importantly, in trying to cure us of loneliness, they cure us of the need for human company, which is pernicious. They make us emotionally unhealthy, and dependent on that unhealthiness.