Making a Podcast

According to Alice Marwick in "Gender, Sexuality, and Social Media," "In today's society, the internet is so essential because it allows people to explore and pursue their respective passions and interests," and I very much agree. The internet has allowed me to be creative in ways I could not be if I were born decades ago. The experience I have working with new media has been with creating short videos on iMovie 10, like hype videos for my dance team, and I would say I am pretty decent at that. However, for my creative project, I chose to try my hand at making my own podcast for the sake of trying something new. I made the podcast I proposed for the S-Town assignment because I wanted to try my hand at storytelling without the visual element, and relying on audio to effectively and entertainingly get my message across.

I'm not an avid listener of podcasts. Every so often I'll listen to a comedic advice podcast called If I Were You, and I keep up with a Buzzfeed vodcast called Buzzfeed Unsolved. I tried to take aspects from both sources to make a story-based podcast that was more conversational than S-Town was.

The title of the podcast I made was Strong Women of History, and my goal was to spread the word about strong women that history forgot, or that few people know about. I thought this was an important topic given recent events, and I wanted to embolden people to "stick it to the man," just as the strong women I would mention in my podcast did. If I were to have made this an actual podcast with multiple episodes, it would have focused on a different female figure each week, followed by a conversation with my guest of the week about how the woman's story is relevant to different aspects of feminism today.

I recorded my podcast over Thanksgiving Break, and my guest was my mom (I tried to get my older sister to come be on the show as well, but she was shy). I shared the story of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was a Mexican nun who lived in the late 1600s, and was a child prodigy and amazing scholar. I used her story to have a conversation about women in education.

As we recorded the podcast, I paused at certain points in the story so my mom and I could react to the information, and talk about its connections to society today. We ended up having to do two recordings, because the first time, my mom was still processing what I told her, so she did not have a lot to say during those pauses. Immediately after we ended the first recording, we went back and had little conversations about the story which I edited into the podcast. The conversation after the story turned into one about women in STEM, which is a topic my mom is very passionate about as a professor of electrical engineering. I like that we were able to have a conversation about a topic that is so relevant today, even cross-culturally, but in retrospect, I think it would have been better to do that for a different historical woman, like Sally Ride, or the women from Hidden Figures.

I also had to find a theme song to play in the intro and closing of the podcast, and I'll be using a royalty-free song entitled "Must Be Love" by Distance that I found on a website called Marmoset Music. I used GarageBand on my laptop to record and edit the podcast, instead of fancy microphones and other high-end equipment. Using GarageBand is pretty intuitive, in my opinion, so it was not hard to edit the podcast. However, because the recording devices were pretty unsophisticated, and I was using the microphone built into my laptop, there are some issues with the quality audio. For example, you can hear the chime of our Beatles-themed clock, and the "shhhh" of me sliding my laptop across the bed. My mom's voice is a little softer than mine as well, because she was sitting farther from the laptop.

According to Nicholas John in "Sharing and the Internet," "The rise of sharing in social media...is understood in relation to a popular conception of the internet as democratic, open and free, and as a platform for non-hierarchical communication." In order to share my podcast with you, I uploaded it on SoundCloud (but in private-mode, because I'm shy). You can listen to it here.

I think this was a really valuable experience for me, because I got to try something new creatively. I have gained a lot of appreciation for those who do host and edit their own podcasts. Going into this project, I had a false expectation that podcasts are just recorded conversations that require very little planning. Now, after creating one myself, I realize that they require a lot of structure and planning beforehand. You have to know what you want to talk about, how you want to talk about it, and how you want your podcast to flow.

I do not see myself ever continuing this podcast, mainly because I am a very shy person, and I would rather not have my social awkwardness on record. Also, I prefer to work with visual media, because I like looking at things more than hearing things.