ABSTRACT
The emergence of a ‘new’ media form is always accompanied by competing definitional narratives articulated through academic, industrial and popular cultural contexts. Such narratives, which seek to frame historical and social impact, often attempt to align a medium’s emergence within either a technologically determinist or a social constructionist perspective. In this chapter, I analyse and reflect on definitional narratives of podcast studies scholarship, which I posit as ‘techno-social’ discourses. In conceptualizing and contextualizing podcasting’s ontology, podcast studies seeks to reconcile the technological ontology of podcasting with diverse claims regarding socio-cultural impact, media transformation, and even new forms of social experience. Reading podcasting’s emergence through a philosophy of technology lens facilitates a reframing of the form’s idiosyncratic development within the digital media landscape. I argue that a core tendency running through such techno-social discourses is the conflation of podcasting as a technology, a practice and a medium. Such rhetorical slippage is useful in exploring complexity of podcasting’s parameters, yet it exemplifies the conceptual imprecision of an emergent discipline that is still fundamentally in flux.
