ABSTRACT
We have reached a point where there is a common recognition that podcasting is a medium in its own right. We can note the familial link to the medium of radio, but as time passes this teenaged medium further defines itself and establishes new forms of production, distribution, and consumption.
This chapter seeks to explore how podcasting might be defined, not purely technically but through its cultures, politics, economics, and aesthetics. These are terms that can be mapped and used to explore how podcasting exhibits characteristics that can be used to reveal patterns about form and origin. The emergence of platforms adds new questions and challenges to the technological definitions of podcasting, but these transformations in themselves pose political questions as they represent a shift from the amateur roots of the medium. In his work on convergence culture, Henry Jenkins argues that media are about cultural practices, rather than the delivery systems; in podcasting this suggests that there is also an ‘aesthetic argument,’ where podcasts are defined by how they sound, despite the common ground they might share with radio in terms of genre or format.
