Friends on Demand
Podcasts as a form of atomized socialization
—By Jonah Mendelson
From iPods to Spotify
Podcasts first emerged in the early 2000s and have exploded in popularity over the past decade. What used to be a niche form has become a near-billion dollar industry, with lucrative licensing deals for distributors. Their listener base continues to grow rapidly, with monthly podcast consumers doubling in the past five years. Most podcast listeners are young adults.
The top charts see professional podcasts by international media conglomerates alongside amateur humor and countless true crime shows. The amateur humor and conversational podcasts, often low-production-value and semi-spontaneous, are more culturally relevant than ever. Joe Rogan is perhaps the most popular and visible independent podcaster, who despite his often-negative public image is nonetheless representative of the growth of subversive amateur personalities as a podcasting archetype, who gain a lot of their appeal from transgressing traditional bounds of the media format.
Professional podcasts continue to grow as well. U-M junior Callie Teitelbaum, the co-host of a conversational, amateur podcast called Subjectively Hot, featuring dating advice and the discussion of college relationships, listens almost exclusively to podcasts that are professionally made because “it’s just more coherent. I find that with an amateur podcast. there’s so much filler in between that I’m not really that interested. But I think that I also turn to podcasts for fun news information, versus other people who view podcasters as pseudo-friends.” The divergence identified by Teitelbaum is supported by studies that indicate that while college students listen to podcasts both for socialization purposes and to educate themselves, the correlation between the two motives is relatively small.
Conversation without Presence
“I tend to listen to podcasts when I’m driving or cooking dinner. They’re good to have playing in the background, to have that conversation going” said Stephen Satarino, a senior at the University of Michigan. His favorite podcasts include The Majority Report with Sam Seder, an independent, progressive political show, and Podcast About List, a crude and irreverent comedy podcast hosted by a group of burnout friends. Of course, a lot of successful radio shows have historically been based off of these same premises, but podcasting is unique for the quantity and variety of those who create them. There are significantly fewer barriers to entry in the industry, which encourages amateur enthusiasts to try their hand at podcasting. Teitelbaum is one such example: “The reason we wanted to create [Subjectively Hot] is because most podcasts out there regarding dating advice, like the very popular podcasts Call Her Daddy and Girls Gotta Eat, [the hosts] are all around 25 years old. It makes some of the advice that they give unrelatable,” said Callie. For everyone I talked to, the concepts of relatability and authenticity are very important when it comes to an amateur podcast. Sam Small, former co-host of the podcast Arts, Interrupted, echoes this sentiment: “I don’t think you could have a really good podcast if you weren’t friends with the person across from you. Because, you know, how do you talk? You want to listen to something that feels genuine.” Both the hosts and the listeners seem to understand that the podcast is a form of media that is uniquely predicated on the latter’s belief that the former is presenting themselves as they really are.
Socialization Without Risk
Parasocial relationships are one-sided feelings of social and emotional connection established by a consumer in relation to personalities depicted in a specific piece of media. This likely isn’t an unfamiliar notion—after all, doesn’t it sometimes feel as though you really know your favorite TV character? According to Dr. Karen Guskin, a developmental psychologist, parasocial relationships are common and powerful: “We know that [people] are hardwired for human connection and that research shows the power of peer and media messages and modeling of behavior in adolescent and young adult development,” she said. It’s no surprise that amateur podcasts, whose appeal is in large part based upon the perceived realism of the interactions between the hosts, so frequently engender the formation of parasocial relationships. This sense of authenticity is deliberately inculcated by amateur podcast hosts such as Teitelbaum: “We work hard to make episodes that are relevant to our listeners and that are relevant to our lives. It started off with friends of ours listening in to hear us talk and what we sound like unfiltered, just the two of us.” The message and the medium synergize: college students listen to Subjectively Hot for content tailored to their interests in the form of a conversation that they might actually have, listening in on an ostensibly unfiltered interaction between their peers.
A key appeal of parasocial relationships is their ease. In a normal social interaction, a person risks negative emotional consequences in the event of perceived failure or inadequacy. This is not the case with parasocial relationships—neither side is vulnerable to the other. Additionally, this virtual “friend” can be engaged with as much or as little as the listener pleases. When the listener craves a sense of companionship, they can have as much as they want without ever having to take on the responsibility of being there for that “friend” in return. If only real friendships were so simple!
Risk associated with social interaction is no longer just emotional — the physical risk associated with being around others in the time of COVID-19 has further intensified this phenomenon of parasocial engagement among young adults. Ricky Kuehn, a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, recently had a particularly acute experience with these difficulties: “I had to quarantine for two weeks when I was exposed to COVID. During that time, I listened to an insane amount of Podcast About List, it actually helped a lot with the isolation and loneliness.… It reminds me a lot of the way me and my friends talk.” It’s not surprising we see podcasts continue to grow at a time when the world is pushing people apart.
A Way To Explore
So, if that’s the case, why are amateur podcasts so popular among young adults in particular? If anything, you would expect young adults to rely upon this form of social pseudo-engagement less than other age cohorts given their frequent exposure to their peers. In fact, studies have shown that a primary motivation for college students to use podcasts is for the purpose of companionship and social interaction. While the predominant cultural perception of the college experience is a time of great sociability, and for many it actually is, for others it can be a period of their life where they feel deeply isolated for the first time. Away from family and old friends, facing new challenges in a new place, the fear of social rejection can grow. At the same time, college students tend to be deeply curious about the world and other people. Podcasts are a way of learning about others and how they interact with each other without actually “risking” anything by interacting with the world at large.
As you might expect from this, a lot of podcasts popular with college students (e.g. Chapo Trap House, Call Her Daddy, Pardon My Take) have hosts who both possess a great deal of erudite knowledge about modern society (politics, pop culture/social trends, and sports respectively) and have a lot of casual, conversational chemistry with each other. “When people listen [to Arts, Interrupted], it’s because they’re the kind of conversations that you might have with your friends. They’re the ideas that you’re considering about Britney Spears or about internet culture.” said Sam Small. Through listening to these shows, college students can partially quench their curiosity and learn about social skills while keeping everything on their terms.
So What?
In many senses, the growth of amateur podcasts is a continuity of previous cultural forces. Parasocial relationships in the conventional sense have existed since the advent of mass media, and, in particular, radio shows and public access television have been exploring the concept of media centered around informal and unscripted conversations for decades.
However, this recent trend of casual podcasts is indicative of a departure from the past in a few significant ways. Typically, trends in amateur media consumption have been localized on at least some level. This led to the development of temporal, regional cultural identities — “scenes,” in other words. A salient example of this was the popularity of bizarre public access television shows in Austin during the 1990s. Now, however, college students across the country can listen to the same podcasts and thereby share the same political interpretations, inside jokes, and even speech mannerisms.
For example, both Ricky Kuehn and Stephen Satarino listen to the rather-niche Podcast About List. Ricky and Stephen have never met or even spoken to one another, but because they share the same object of their parasocial “friendship,” there is a lot of overlap in their vocabulary and humor. There has always been “youth culture” but transmission speed is now near-instantaneous and hyper-specific. This is different from sharing references from other forms of media such as TV and film: shared references are specific, finalized occurrences as depicted in media whereas shared parasocial relationships involve the absorption of continuing patterns of behavior. While podcasts did not invent the concept of shared cultural input, they are a new step forward in what type of interactions are shared. “One of the most important arenas in which adolescents and young adults connect with others is online, and we also know that young adults are looking for ways to practice skills and develop into competent and independent adults” said Karen Guskin. Engagement in a parasocial relationship with a podcaster is like a football player watching game tape, and most college students are eager to get in off the sideline.
Feature photo by M. Johnson (www.songsimian.com)