Bringing Your Opinion Into the Conversation

While on her break way from base, Pilar ponders on the nature of podcasts as "personal chronicles".

I hadn’t planned a show for this week, but I made an effort to keep to a regular schedule. I’m actually not at home, so the audio will sound different and the set up is not as comfortable.

The trigger for jumping behind the microphone was listening to Daniel Aragay in Haciendo el Sueco, where he talks about his time in Sweden. Recently he commented on a Twitter conversation, after a person shared a strange experience when he stayed with a Swedish family a long time ago.

As podcasters, we have the opportunity to set the record straight when people are talking about something with no access to the context - in this case, Spanish people talking about life in Sweden. In some cases, we can act as “culture bridges”, giving access to people from our country of origin to another culture.

We decide how much of ourselves we bring into our podcast, although it’s a shame when some hosts decide to leave most of themselves out of the conversation. Podcasting is such an intimate medium, that it seems like a missed opportunity. But there is no right or wrong.

Listeners also have a preference, with some enjoying those shows where they really feel like they get to know the host, while some prefer to get the information in a straight forward way.

By the way, my friend Simon and I are putting together an audio course. We’ve been working on the material as a text-based programme, but when we got to record some additional audio for it, we ended up with something that sounded more like the audio version of the course. We realised that the material would work as an audio-first course, delivered by both of us together, so we’re giving that a try.

Going back to the theme of podcasters bringing a lot of themselves and their lives to the show, I’ve recently come across Beyond Retirement, where the host started the podcast when she was about to retire, and now she’s retired. She’s talking to people at the same stage of life as she is in, and with a similar mindset. (I really like in her show how she has an interview with a guest in one episode, and then releases a solo episode with reflections on the interview.)

A podcast can be a “personal chronicle”, a kind of memoir. This show is a bit like this, and it also gives me the opportunity to talk about podcasting.

When we bring ourselves to the show, our listeners get to know us, and this is an example of “asymmetrical intimacy”, where listeners feel like they know us very well but we don’t really know them.

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