Pam Lach is a digital humanities librarian at San Diego State University. This week, she is coming to Arizona State University to give a talk called “The Stories We Still Need: Podcasting For Urgent Times.”
The Show has covered several stories over the last year about the pervasive influence of chat show podcasts on politics. With the medium becoming so ubiquitous, podcasting often seems less urgent than ever before.
When The Show team saw the title of Lach’s talk, it felt like a somewhat provocative idea.
Lach says she got the inspiration for her talk from some experiences she had back in 2020 and 2021. She was working with the National Humanities Center on a series of weeklong podcasting workshops geared towards doctoral students.
The timing of the workshops overlapped with a series of disruptive events in American culture: the COVID-19 quarantines, the murder of George Floyd and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
As Lach told The Show, when the workshop participants sent in their podcasts, she noticed that many of them were telling personal stories connected to those events.
Full conversation
PAM LACH: And those were the most moving for me because it was participants grappling with a series of issues related to what it meant to go into isolation, how that impacted our experience of time and intimacy. Many of our groups grappled with structural and systemic racism and police violence. And then as we progressed into January 2021, a lot of those podcasts were trying to make sense of the insurrection, continuing to make sense of loneliness.
We had a podcast about grief with a member who had recently lost her partner. These were powerful, gut wrenching, raw, vulnerable podcasts.
SAM DINGMAN: And am I hearing you right, Pam, that these were folks who were willing to share their own personal experience or personal perspective on a larger story? It was their own life that was informing their storytelling.
LACH: Absolutely. And of course, not everybody took it to that personal level, but so many participants did. And that’s what was so powerful, it was that they were willing to share a little bit of themselves with a group of strangers. My colleagues and I who ran the institutes, we really tried to engineer that through a set of guided conversations and a set of shared readings.
We had them read Adrienne Maree Brown’s “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds,” and we asked students to use that approach of scaling down, aiming for smaller, working from a place of trust and for being more present and not so worried about perfection.
DINGMAN: Yeah.
LACH: And in particular, this one principle: There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. That, I think, drove a lot of our participants to search within themselves.
DINGMAN: You know, I have to say, Pam, I’m so compelled by this idea, because in my mind, and please tell me if you disagree, so much of what characterizes the current political moment — and this felt true at the moments from just a few years ago that you’re describing as well — is the velocity at which things are happening, the speed at which various kinds of media, whether it’s cable news or social media, come at you with information that feels unprecedented and also very emotionally tragic.
And there is a tendency in storytelling about moments like that to try to go big, to try to get your arms around everything. And what you’re describing is the inverse of that, if I’m hearing you correctly.
LACH: Yes, yes, absolutely. We really embraced the emergent strategy principle: Small is good, small is all. The large is a reflection of the small. And by that, we really encouraged that sort of scaling down and slowing down as a way to filter through all the noise.
DINGMAN: Do you think there is something about podcasting as a medium that makes it uniquely suited to this kind of small-bore, intimate, emotionally, personally grounded type of storytelling?
LACH: I think it is absolutely suited for that type of storytelling for a couple of reasons. It is, at its heart, a very DIY medium. It doesn’t require a lot of fancy equipment, although certainly you can spend a lot of money on podcasting equipment. You can create a makeshift studio wherever you are.
You can publish it for free and push it out to people through a free RSS feed. And what was really interesting to see in the pandemic was a real uptick in podcasting, both creation and listening, even though people weren’t commuting to work, which is often one of the big ways they engage with podcasts. But it was about human connection.
DINGMAN: Yeah.
LACH: Most people listen with headphones, so the sound is actually coming into your body. It’s incredibly intimate. And I suspect that that’s what’s happening right now. We’re all siloed from each other. Social media has completely splintered. It’s full of harmful content. And through all of that, we’re desperately seeking for authentic human connection.
DINGMAN: Yeah, but can I ask you, Pam? You are obviously an evangelist for podcasting. I, too — I came to radio from the world of podcasting. It’s a medium that is very dear to me. But I’m curious to get your take on the state of things, because as I know you know, the definition of what podcasts are has changed so much in recent years, particularly with the increased emphasis on them becoming a visual medium, which changes so much of all of the lovely elements of podcasting that you were just rhapsodizing about.
We’ve had conversations on this show before about the ways that podcasts have become symptomatic of the harmful content that we get on social media. They’ve become ways of spreading misinformation, platforming nefarious political actors without challenging them on their beliefs or the claims that they’re making. Do you worry about the sustainability of the version of podcasting that you care about so deeply?
LACH: That’s such a lovely question, and I will say ... it's funny that you have this impression of me as an evangelist for podcasting. I actually, I am and I’m not. I think that whenever somebody approaches me and says that they want to launch a podcast, I always ask them, “Why?” Like, how will that podcast reflect their values? And if they can’t give me a good answer, I’ll gently suggest that maybe they’re not ready to launch a podcast.
The people who tell me, “I just want to do it because it’ll be cool, or I’m trying to, you know, spread my— I’m trying to reach more markets or build my audience,” I’m less interested in that kind of podcasting.
As long as people can still publish an audio file online and push it out through an RSS feed, we can still have these kinds of podcasts that can move us to change.
DINGMAN: Well, you know, it strikes me, Pam, that you’re asking people who say to you that they want to start a podcast a really important but also provocative question. This idea of, like, “Great, how does that reflect your values?” I mean, that’s a question that could stop somebody in their tracks, you know.
LACH: And it has. I start everybody there. Whenever someone has an idea, whether it’s a digital project, or an assignment that they want to introduce in their class or a podcast, if they don’t understand what the thing they’re going to invest a lot of time and labor into, how that aligns with who they are and the kind of work they’re doing, then it's just noise, I think.
DINGMAN: Well, Pam Lach is a digital humanities librarian at San Diego State University, and she’ll be at Arizona State University this Wednesday, November 12, to give a talk called “The Stories We Still Need: Podcasting for Urgent Times.” Pam, thank you for this conversation.
LACH: You’re welcome. It’s been such a pleasure.
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