Media and the Quest for Identity with Andrew McLuhan and Henry Jenkins #2

Welcome to The Future of You. Today we're joined by Henry Jenkins and Andrew McLuhan. Henry is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California Annenberg School. He's authored and co-authored over a dozen books, including By Any Media Necessary, The New Youth Activism, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Now, I remember reading Convergence Culture roughly about the same time I joined Twitter, so it must have been about 2009. I remember thinking how exciting these new frontiers of media seemed with all these new possibilities and increased participation for all of us. And I met Henry recently during a panel I was chairing at Moscow's Nobel Vision Conference, and we were discussing the future of the entertainment industry, actually. It's, um, its new digital leisure formats, to be precise. And as Henry talked about activist creators, participatory media, and the way in which the quality TV entertainment landscape is now global rather than just American, I thought I'd love to hear his take on hot and cold media, as well as many other McLuhan theories and, and laws of media. So Andrew McLuhan is our other guest. He is the grandson of Marshall McLuhan, noted Canadian professor from the University of Toronto, who was truly a pioneer in the field of media and communication studies, or media ecology, as we might call it. Andrew's father, Eric McLuhan, was Marshall's eldest son, and he worked with Marshall from the mid-1960s until Marshall died in 1980. From 1980 until his death in 2018, Eric continued the work he began with his father, completing important works such as Laws of Media: The New Science, Media and Formal Cause, and Theories of Communication. And it was in 2009, I think, that Andrew began work documenting and inventorying Marshall McLuhan's annotated library, which was his first major McLuhan project and one he speaks on regularly. Since then, he has embarked on delivering a one-of-a-kind forensic course 33 weeks or 37 weeks, maybe. We'll find out when we listen to the podcast, delving into Marshall's famous book, Understanding Media. Of course, I can vouch for this as one of his students. Andrew is also a published poet in his own right with his new collection, Written Matter, which was published by Seattle's Revelore Press. And he is currently the director of the McLuhan Institute. It was fascinating to bring these two experts in media together, obviously coming from very different perspectives on media, but obviously, as you'll hear, there is some overlap and some real areas of interest where we talk about identity and our changing identity in a digitized world. Particularly, we talk about the internet and the influence that the internet has had on not only our personal identity, but the forming of communities of interest and how those have morphed into fandom communities and the sort of work and passion and participation that fans now have in the content. So we talked across three areas broadly. We really started off thinking about identity and the role of digital media and what's changed and whether there are any patterns over time. And then we probed whether digital media was a force for decentralization and considered some of the trends and counter-trends, discussing whether actually there was a kind of re-centralization happening, particularly in the area of commercial media. But we ended up on a fascinating conversation about podcasts. Andrew and Henry both have their own podcast series. And of course we were on a podcast, so it seemed a bit meta and an opportunity not to be missed to talk about the meaning of podcasts, how they might develop, but also how similar or different they were from the media of radio. And I think you'll find their final comments, particularly in terms of where podcasts may or may not go next, fascinating. So without further ado, let's listen in to Andrew and Henry. Welcome, Andrew and Henry. It's fantastic to have you both here together. You are the perfect people, experts in fact, to talk about, well, what we're going to talk about today, which is media and some of its effects on identity. Well, the interplay between identity and digital media. I'd like to open, I guess, by thinking about how you think media and media technologies, by extension, have really influenced our notions of identity, perhaps over the past and bringing us up to the present. Do you have any sort of general thoughts on the trends in that area? Andrew, do you want to start?

Sure. Thank you, Tracey. It's, it's so lovely to speak with you. It's been a little while. You know, it's interesting the way you phrase that because our notions of identity, I think, are a little bit different than our identities themselves. And I think we think about identity in a more sophisticated way these days, in the last decade, decades, than we ever have. And that's probably due to the fact that our identities are so constantly under assault, that it seems we're constantly looking to understand who we are, and realizing that we don't know who that is. And a lot of that has to do with, I think, the scale, but mainly the speed of change these days. You know, it's funny, I was speaking with somebody yesterday about identity, and I thought back to when I was a teenager and how wrapped up your identity is in the music that you listen to, when I was a teenager anyway. You know, at school, you divide into factions and the hip-hop kids are over there and the emo kids are over here and the punk kids are over there, and it really is the base of your identity. Well, it seems as your tastes change, your identities change too. And I think that's kind of a microcosm for the larger way that our identities shift because of technological change. And that's something that in the last 2 years has gone into overdrive, I think, which may be why identity is more and more a topic of conversation and concern.

Yeah, I think so. I wondered if you could expand on something I discovered while I was researching my book, actually, and I do note it in the book. I quote Marshall McLuhan, your grandfather, of course, when he talked about how all forms of violence are a quest for identity. And this, this idea that when you live out on the frontier— and I suppose we're talking about the media frontier— you have no identity, so you're a nobody, so you need to get quite tough and you need to somehow assert your identity. I mean, I'm Going back to some of the video footage that I saw where he talked about this, and I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he was talking about extremists. But I think, you know, when you look at some of the social discourse on social media today, some of it you could say is pretty violent, actually. And is this a quest for identity? Do you see the parallels there?

For sure. It's interesting why our quest for identity should be so so violent, or violence seems to accompany it, but it does seem to be one of the burning questions for humanity, and it does seem to be a human question of who am I, and what is, you know, what is the point of life? So what is my identity in relation to life? Why am I here? Why that should be so important as to cause such violent reactions, I don't know if anybody knows the answer,, but it is an observation that Marshall made that it seems to be the two things go hand in hand.

Henry, what do you think about that? I know you've done a lot of work around identity and fandom and sort of group identity. Do you have any comments on this?

Well, I think first of all, I'd go back to your original formulation where you seem to flitter between effects and influences. And I am definitely an influence guy and not an effects guy, right? And I think there are important distinctions between the two because I do believe media influences us, but we also influence media in profound ways. And I think what we're seeing is a negotiation over the meaning of identity that comes out of a number of factors. So first I would say is what I call the global scramble, which is partially a product of immigration, migration, refugees, but also a product of our ability to access via streaming media a range of media from around the world. I first started thinking about this around Hong Kong and action cinema and anime fandom, where people who I call pop cosmopolitans were seeking out difference from somewhere else on the planet. That is, if traditional cosmopolitanism was about finding kinship elsewhere to escape the parochialism of your own culture, this new generation are seeking it through pop culture. And Netflix is facilitating that but accelerating it at the same time. So the Squid Game success last year is a big example where 60 countries around the world— this Korean drama was the top hit. I was just before the show watching part of an episode of All of Us Are Dead, which is the new Korean drama about high school students besieged by zombies. And again, it's a global success. So that's one. Two is the reckoning with race, which has been particularly intense in the US but elsewhere, right? And that is partially a product of a couple of media. One would be the cell phone with the ability to do counter-surveillance or street-level surveillance, where police violence and racialized police violence has been more and more captured. And yet the shock that would, even when it's captured on film, no one does anything about it, has intensified the rage there and led to some sense of systemic racism. The other would be Twitter, right, where a hashtag like Black Lives Matter assembles stories that at one time would have been locally discrete incidents and helps people see the pattern between them. And so in those ways, I think media has accelerated what are already social tensions. The third would be the question around gender and gender fluidity, which I think is a really important one. The fact that this platform we're using to record this requires us to specify our pronouns suggest how it is responding to and yet teaching us new protocols for dealing with gender in our everyday lives. And I— so again, media is an influence on and influenced by these social trends that we're look— talking about. Now, the violence of identity, that's a really tough one, right? I mean, we, we could go back through history and look at initiation rites right, and where people either commit self-violence or violence toward others, you know, as in, you know, sort of absorbing torture or participating in war raids or hunting, were always ways of initiating yourself into an adult identity in our society. I would argue video games today perform some of those functions, right, where people are playing games with the same themes that might have preoccupied adolescents thousands of years ago. Kill or be killed. But in a symbolic reign where real violence has been reined in and controlled. Or we could again talk about Twitter and the aggression of language on Twitter and the dividing up into tribalism. And that tribalism is something that Marshall McLuhan predicted a long time ago that we had the global village on the one hand and the new tribalism on the other as somewhat conflicting visions of the future of ubiquitous communication technologies. And I think what we're seeing right now is the tribalism side really asserting itself. And we could see my pop cosmopolitanism as the voice of the global village asserting itself.

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic segue actually into that whole idea of tribalism or retribalism. I wonder if, Andrew, you want to expand on this because I know it's, it is an area that you're expert in, in terms of interpreting what Marshall meant by that.

Well, there's, there's another facet to identity here, which is that there are at least two kinds of identity, and that's private identity, individual identity, and group identity. And another part of this conversation is also belonging. And Henry was getting at this, that with the internet and technology, smartphones, it's never been easier to find your people, you know, because culture is global now. It doesn't really matter if you live here in a small town between farms or if you live in a city. It's just as easy to find a group and to discover things which you might decide to incorporate into your identity. Another thing which is interesting to consider in terms of violence and identity and the quest for identity is, and I hadn't thought of it before, but the vision quest. And whether it be sending somebody off to fast for a couple days and have a vision to discover things about themselves or their place, or whether it's via drugs like ayahuasca, you know, through a shaman or whatever, it's also a form of trauma. In this attempt to seek an identity, which is very interesting to consider.

It's almost like you're coming up against challenges and it's the challenge or how you meet them that formulates your identity, or maybe not formulates it, but concretizes it somehow. Because, you know, decision-making is value clarification, isn't it? So when you decide what tribe you're in or how you respond to something, I guess that's in a sense telling you what your values are and therefore where you belong or who you are, presumably.

So I read a very interesting piece recently by a media scholar who was looking at medieval art and specifically the how vision was represented and the vision quest in particular. And it inevitably involved frames, screens, or mirrors reflecting back into the self. But the imagery is striking that she looks at in this piece that suggests that they needed to imagine a medium to think about the vision quest from very early ages. And in some ways, they look toward television or the internet as metaphors for thinking about what their spiritual experience would be, and that this predates the invention of the actual technologies.

Even the language around identity seems to be somewhat violent. Like, we speak of how your identity is forged, you know, and forging something, forging a piece of iron or steel is a violent process. But then there's also forging as in a forgery, which is an interesting way to think about it too.

And forgeries in media, deepfakes, that's quite a thing right now.

Quite. And which is more powerful, and what even is your true identity? Because I don't think that we have a single identity. If you just take the simple example of all the different logins and passwords we have, these are all identities, right? And we speak of them that way, identity theft, right? The split identity, the multiple identity, the schizophrenia, even multiple personality disorder, I think has become the norm. So what does this mean when we don't have a single identity anymore, but we have a collection of identities and who I am on Twitter is a little bit different than who I am on Facebook, than who I am on Instagram, than who I am here, than who I am when I go home and when my kids get off the bus. You know, this is, is a very, very new thing. I think. It's not necessarily new that we have different facets of identity, but I think the variety of identities we carry is remarkable. And this isn't even to bring up, you know, manufactured identities that people hide behind, internet trolls, and, you know, nobody ever thinks they're a troll, but, or on dating sites when you put maybe your best foot forward, but it's not necessarily really your foot? There, there are a lot of questions here. And what's the effect of this over time on your, on your sense of self? I think it's, it leads to more violence, perhaps internal if not external.

Henry, do you think this idea of, um, sort of multiple identities, or at least having more fluid identities, helps or has helped the growth of fandom? Is there a connection between those two that can be articulated, or that they've just grown up you know, then happened to sort of coexist.

Well, I think fandom has always enjoyed identity play. I mean, I, I, that's a strong statement because we don't know how far back to trace fandom, but let's suppose the 1890s is as good a point to start as, uh, and otherwise is reading Susan Orland's The Library Book has a very brief reference that I really want to dig into of when the LA Public Library opened, they had a week-long festival of Charles Dickens in which the public was invited to show up dressed like their favorite Dickens character and participate in panels discussing Dickens' work and so forth. And from the eyes of someone who is a fan, who studies fandom, that sounds like a fan convention. It sounds like the cosplay that takes place at San Diego Comic-Con. Only applied to a different set of texts. When you discover the Baker Street Irregulars that were organized in the UK around Sherlock Holmes in that same time period, they're already playing with this notion of a multiple and fake identity, that there's a lot of identity play around pen names in the early zines of the first part of the 20th century. And by the 1940s and '50s, there's some well-known incidents where a science fiction writer passes as male but is actually female, James Tiptree Jr., and where a fan constructs themselves as a Black fan to see how the fan community, which at the time was overwhelmingly white, might treat a Black fan. But in a culture that was based on the postal service and print was able to get away with it. So no shocker then that the internet fan community still engages in these kinds of identity play, or that fans being some of the earliest adapters of new media technology systematically might have imprinted some of that identity play onto the internet. Just to give you an example of how deep that imprint is, and how invisible it is, if you go back to the late, mid-19th century, people were creating zines using toy printing presses where they hand-set letters, and because it was so hard to set, they went, they reverted to a lot of standardized abbreviations, and one of those is LOL, or laugh out loud, which we now think of as emblematic of internet culture, but actually is part of a 19th century print culture that was carried into the internet by fans and their influence on the early history of the web and the net.

Do you think some of the media that we're now using or enjoying is having a decentralizing effect where communities can get together more easily and are less homogeneous, and that's enabling more and more sort of groups and fandom and I don't know, sort of senses of belonging in lots of different identities across lots of different groups. I'm wondering about, you know, the breakdown of mass media at its very sort of generic level, perhaps the post-TV era. Is it a more decentralized world of numerous communities because of the media? I don't know if you've got comments on that.

I think that's certainly the case, and it's been the case for a while. One of the early striking examples of that, for me anyway, is in hip-hop culture, specifically in graffiti, and how graffiti spread from the US, from New York and Pittsburgh and across the US, and then globally through, actually through magazines and through internet, thanks to the digital camera. It allowed these forms to spread, and within a very short period of time, graffiti was around the world. So I think this tendency to decentralize has just grown stronger over time. And I think it's a net benefit to, pun intended, I guess.

Yeah, what I was going to say is that very peculiar to and caused by or an effect of the internet. I mean, I don't like to see that as a media because that's almost the technology that sits behind several media, but What is the decentralization caused by exactly, do we think?

Well, if I could take a little step back and build on what Eric just said, one of my grad students documented the spread of dance videos in Bogotá. And this was a city really riven by gangs and gang turf. And yet dance videos and dance moves were traveling across it thanks to the mix of video cameras and YouTube, right? So that's a spectacular example of recentralizing or reconfiguring social life that has already been fragmented by the use of the same technology. Now fans are a good case study for thinking about this phenomenon because they were networked going back to that Tory printing press moment that I was talking about in the mid-19th century where they were circulating zines on it through the mail on a national network, that fandom was stating— asserting itself as world science fiction convention when it really was a gathering of folks from Brooklyn and Cleveland, right? But there was a sense, there's always been a sense that fan interests are narrow or specific enough that it's hard to find people in your immediate location to engage with them, but that— so there's a search for technologies which enabled that. And so it might have been the toy printing press at one point, it was ham radio at another point, then it became the internet, right? I think in between we might talk about local access television and the spreads of videotapes and so forth. All these mechanisms that fans have used to connect to each other across distance. But this is a case— I don't think the internet creates that desire I think the internet facilitates that desire because of its affordances which allows it to happen. And as it starts happening, it gains momentum, more and more people participate in it, the speed and scale of interaction intensifies. So when Star Trek: The Next Generation was on, we used to trade responses to the individual episodes via— we'd send the things into one central location, it'd be edited into a zine, be printed and sent out. And 2 months later, we'd find out what other people thought about the episode we watched. Now, obviously now at the first commercial break, we can start to respond, if not earlier, on Twitter or some other social media platform. All that apparatus has been shrunk by the emergence of the internet. And so therefore, when it be— something becomes easier to do, more people do it. But I'm not of the opinion the internet created it from scratch. It created it in response to social desires that were already deeply seated in the population.

Mm, understood. Andrew, do you agree?

Yeah. You know, Marshall used this phrase, the global village, which he kind of appropriated from Wyndham Lewis. But I think we've gone beyond, or at least in conjunction with a global village. I like to think of it kind of like a global metropolis. And case in point, you know, you and I speaking, Tracey, we connected partly because I was teaching this class on understanding media. And I like to think of the internet kind of like New York City, because where I live here in the country in Southern Ontario, if I were to advertise a course where each week over a year and a half, we'll spend 3 hours talking about understanding media, I don't think I'd have a single person. The thing about a city like New York City is, uh, because of the critical mass of people, it makes things possible. Like, you can have a store devoted to renting horror VHS tapes, and the people who run it can make a living because of— out of the 8 or whatever million in New York City, there are enough there into that niche VHS horror scene to sustain something like that. Well, because of Twitter, I was able to find an audience for my really niche discussion group on understanding media. And where I thought I'd maybe have 5 people interested, I ended up with 30 or 40. So affordances kind of allow things to grow, I think, exponentially. And it's really interesting to think of this notion of fandom as well, which isn't something I'd thought about before, but I'm going to have to look into it, Henry.

It's an interesting point that Henry just made about the speed of response, like the critique, the response on any content, almost in the blink of an eye, really. And I think about your course that you did, what was it, 33 weeks? I mean, was it 33?

It was It was 37.

37? Oh, it only felt like 33. But that idea that it gave a— it gave it room to breathe, it had enough room for people to participate. If you think 37 times 3 hours, and it was a long time, ideas were settling, the response was generating, we were listening to what other people were expressing, perhaps changing our minds. Considering our own responses as an individual and as a group then. And all of these were very interesting dynamics, I thought, around it. And you probably agree, I think. But Henry's point exactly, you know, you're waiting for like the Twitter response, the sarcastic, you know. When Sex and the City's new season came out and Just Like That, I mean, literally ready to go after the first episode is the writer's room on the podcast. So they're ready to sort of tell you what they really meant just in case you weren't happy with what they've done with the characters. And so that was interesting dimension. But on top of that, they were also trying to anticipate what the fans would think and say about it, I think. And all of that was kind of happening in real time. It's kind of fascinating.

Now, to build on your Sex and the City example, what I was going to say is I think hate-watching is a phenomenon of the internet, right? This is a case where people might have sat and said snarky things in their living room to each other and had a small social gathering, the pleasure of watching certain shows, and certain shows thrive right now not because people like them, but because they like to make snarky comments collectively toward them that's facilitated by something like Twitter. And so it— that is a good example of how accelerating time amplifies a phenomenon and makes it more visible. Now when I think about the big city phenomenon that Andrew was just talking about, I think about Yoyogi Park in Tokyo. And I went there the first time to see cosplay, anime cosplay, because they would— if you went to the Akihabara district, the fan district in Tokyo, and I love that there is a fan district in Tokyo, there are flyers that tell you what show people are going to be cosplaying that weekend so you know what costume to go to. But just beyond them is a group of so-called yonkis who dance to rockabilly songs that have exaggerated Elvis haircuts, and beyond that is a drum circle, and beyond that are boy band interpreters, and beyond that kites or skichess. So every inch of the park is mapped out around niche interest. And the people with that interest know where to gather on a weekend afternoon to find others who share that interest and to participate on them. So this is a park, not a village, But if we amplify that out to the planet, that is exactly what the internet is. But just as if I went to Yo-Yogi, I could spend an hour drumming and then wander over and fly a kite, I'm not locked into a single identity. And so that is the way in which I think the internet has amplified identity play, where we recognize suddenly that we don't belong to simply one group, we belong to many groups. And by performing that movement from one discussion list to the other early on, we started to become conscious of the number of groups we belong to, the number of identities we played in the course of our lives. And suddenly identity becomes something we're thinking about in deeper and deeper ways.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, that's the simultaneous recentralization or centralization anyway a meeting point, because I think getting together is still very important, and perhaps it's become even more meaningful in the last 2 years when getting together has become more difficult. Hate watching is not a term I had heard before. That to me, I can't imagine. I can't imagine having nothing better to do than to, like, rage tweet, watch something. Just, you know, it reminds me of this phenomena of the reaction video. You know, which people aren't really interested so much in the primary content as the reaction to it, which then becomes the primary content, which is kind of strange and bizarre to me, but normal in another sense. But it's, you know, we've mentioned pace, and pacing was one of the things I put a lot of thought into in my course. And this was a course called Understanding Media Intensive. And it was 36 or 37 classes, 3 hours each, covering 33 chapters of this book, Understanding Media. And I wanted it to be a week apart to give room to breathe. Because, you know, that pace is very important. And actually, funnily enough, the same conversation I was having yesterday with a friend about identity, we also talked about pacing. And I explained it like this. You know, I used to live in Picton, the town nearby, and the post office to go get my mail is about, you know, a 5-minute walk, right? But I would often drive, especially on nice days, because the thing about living in a small town, a global village, is that you know everybody, and this 5-minute walk turns into a half hour because I see Paul, and I see Pat, and I see Jane, and you have to stop and say hi and be polite and pleasant, and you want to catch up or say something. But I just want to get the mail sometimes, you know, so I'll drive to get the mail. But when I do that, I miss things. And what I miss is I miss the certain qualities. It's like driving somewhere versus walking somewhere. If you just want to get somewhere, drive. But if you want a quality of experience, and I think life is about quality of experience, then you have to walk sometimes. And that was kind of the idea behind doing UMI in the way that we did it, was to allow us to have some breathing room to take this material on and kind of embody it and sit with it and let it develop over an incredibly long period of time. I'm so grateful to all the students like you, Tracey, who were part of it that allowed me to actually lead it because it was one of the richest experiences of my life.

No, it was amazing. I'm so glad that I discovered it, you know, by happenstance really in a funny sort of way. But I mean, it was terrific and it was a one-off, it was something unique, I think. So I was very lucky to be involved with it. I want to turn to a very specific question actually because I want to ask you both about podcasts. I know Andrew's done a lot of podcast interviews. Henry's got his own podcast, which he can tell us about. We're on a podcast now, and I wanted to ask you what you think this whole phenomenon is about. And it's funny that we just were talking about tribalisation or re-tribalisation because, and Andrew will correct me probably if I get this wrong, but I think the chapter in Understanding Media on radio is called The Tribal Drum. Isn't it? And one of the things I was thinking about is, are podcasts radio? They seem something different to radio. Are they a sort of cousin of radio? What is going on? And it kind of speaks to both the media and the specific media of radio that Marshall was talking about, as well as what Henry is talking about with fandom and participation, I think. And I wonder if we can just spend a the last sort of 10 minutes or so, just interrogating what these podcasts are about, the character and the usefulness and where we think they might go next. I wonder if I can start with you first, Henry, because I know you have an interest in the podcast media, don't you?

Yes. Well, first of all, I do have my own podcast, which is called How Do You Like It So Far? And it's about pop culture in a changing world. So we talk every week about the kinds of questions we're talking about here with a range of really interesting guests who have different stories to tell about their relation to popular culture. I'm also now teaching a course at USC as part of a new podcasting major that we've launched. And the course I'm teaching is on the history of podcasting, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but actually I de— able to incorporate the history of radio into the history of podcasting. By looking at formats and genres and where they come from and work backwards, backwards from there. So, but I think that helps me to think a lot about the relation of podcast to radio. Podcasting as a technology emerged as an attempt to move around radio, to open up radio formats to people who would be shut out otherwise. It was an amateur medium. It was a medium for those who were disconnected disaffected, marginalized, silenced, whatever we want to say. And its history has been largely shaped by that. It's also shaped by the fact that it was NPR in the US and CBC in Canada and BBC in the UK that were the first to use it. It started— the earliest broadcasters to move into podcasting were almost all public radio people, public service radio people. Not commercial radio people, and the result is that its logics, its programming, are much more about smart conversation than they are about playing music with commentary, for example. So this is a case where institutional histories start to shape how things play out. The other thing I think about is the earbud, and this is where I slide more into the McLuhan side of the spectrum here, because I think the ear— in the case of the earbud, the medium is the message. The intimacy we have of a voice directly in our ear, almost directly in our brain, changes our relationship to radio. So the radio world talks about driveway moments, where you've pulled into your driveway and you've stopped your car, but you're not getting out yet because you want to hear the last bit of something. That's so compelling that you don't leave your car. And that's the high point in radio. In podcasting, it's where you start to just become entranced by the voice in your ear. And the first time I did a program recently with a bunch of my favorite podcasters all in one place, and I said it was so reassuring to discover these were real people and not voices in my head, because since I listen to it going to sleep at night, it's like I dreamed the podcast. That I'm consuming and that intimacy becomes part of the experience of the podcast. And so I think that's something I think about a lot is intimacy in podcasting as opposed to publicness and liveness in radio as being kind of crucial divides between the two formats.

That's brilliant, I thought.

Yeah, those are some very interesting notions. It's interesting to think, and here I am with earbuds in my ear, although I don't prefer it that way. I prefer to listen to speakers if I can. But it's interesting to think about, you know, the voice being directly into your brain, almost like an auditory hallucination or a mystical experience even, because that's what it kind of closely resembles. You know, I actually have a podcast as well. It's called The Massage from the McLuhan Institute. And I've done one season of interviews so far. I think there were about a dozen of them. But it's also a place to leave McLuhan audio for people to listen to. I'm not entirely sure what a podcast really actually is, because sometimes it's video and sometimes it's audio, and I believe most— a lot of people simply call it the pod these days. There's no cast, although the cast part is interesting as well when you're thinking about a voice beam to your ear or something mystical or a spell being cast. But it is a very interesting subject. The relation, the history coming from public radio is also very interesting to me. You know, when Marshall first said, "The medium is the message," it was in 1958 at a radio broadcasters conference in British Columbia in Canada. And it's 1958, they were really upset about television coming along. And Marshall said the medium is the message to try and tell them that television wasn't going to end radio, but it was going to change radio's place. And it's kind of interesting to think about the podcast in relation to radio, and perhaps Netflix and streaming services in relation to television, because here you both have flexible formats in the face of more rigid formats. You know, where television or radio programming is a set thing. You know that the news is going to be at noon followed by a program from 1 to 2, whereas Netflix is whenever you want to listen to half an hour or 12 hours or watch. And same with podcasts, you know, you can listen to it when you want for how long you want. Another thing that's interesting about it that disconnects it a bit from radio is the mobile aspect. And this does make a difference for myself. And I recognize that I'm maybe not like a lot of other people, but when I'm out in nature, outside doing things, I don't like to have earbuds in listening to things. I like to be more attuned to my environment and hear the sounds going on around me. Because when you've got the earbuds in, they are at the exclusion of everything else. And to me, again, kind of related to split identities, this creates split experiences. And for myself, I don't do too well with that. I'm kind of a one thing at a time kind of person, maybe a bit of a throwback. Maybe I read too much. I don't know.

It's kind of interesting, I think, the way that the podcast landscape has developed its own sorts of rituals now. I mean, you talk about earbuds, obviously that's one of them, but you know, whether As you say, you know, I look forward to a particular podcast coming out on a certain time at a certain night. And if they don't happen, I'm disappointed because I'm sort of waiting for my fix for that. And in a sense, it's like an extension to a friendship group because I want to know what other people think about the week's events, you know, within that group, those sorts of things. And then you've got the other side of podcasting, which is almost like the adoration, the worship of certain celebrities who've got their podcast episodes. And obviously I'm thinking of like someone like Joe Rogan. And you've got these— it just feels to me like it is probably the most diversified sort of media landscape at the moment, even though the format isn't particularly that different. There's something very, very different. It's not— doesn't feel as homogeneous to me as a lot of other media.

Yeah, I think that has to do with the fact that it was set up to be the amateur reaction to radio, that we lose track of that as more and more commercial podcast networks emerge and it becomes centralized again around those factors. And the most heavily listened to podcasts inevitably come from those networks. But the fact that no matter how small the niche is, I can find a podcast for it, and it doesn't necessarily require professionalization to participate. And even if the networks took over the most mainstream pieces of the podcast, landscape, there is no way they could ever drive out the amateur voices other than making them harder to find, right? Because they will always be there. And so, you know, I think what thrives in the podcast world are those things that were part of the people's radio movements of the '60s and '70s. I got my start with Radio Free Georgia, and they used to have programming for gay people. They had programming for prisoners. They had feminist programming. They had youth-driven programming. These represent large categories, or I can at least populate those categories with pop mainstream podcasts. Oh, and of course, people of color or BIPOC people would also be on those podcasts on, on the radio of a Radio Free Georgia because they were meant to be the alternative to dominant or mainstream radio. And podcasting looks very much like the program lineup for Radio Free Georgia today. And I think it will for some time to come. But we are seeing, to my eyes, a threatening consolidation around mainstream commercial entities that threaten to close out things like this podcast or our— in any of our 3 podcasts, all of which are coming from academic places. And which historically have not gotten a lot of airtime, you know, on broadcast medium.

Sorry, Henry, what's the driver for that? What's the motivation for that? The recentralization?

Well, I think what happened is podcasts plodded along for about a decade where some of the biggest successes were high school students talking about Harry Potter novels in their basement and reaching a million viewers apiece. And then we got the Serial and the invasion of NPR into that. And Serial demonstrated that it was possible to have a podcast that everyone in the country was talking about. And that's what we're seeking now. And we're seeing— and the celebrity side that you're talking about, the Joe Rogans, who I think is consistently in the top 5 podcasts in the US. I don't know about Canada or the UK, but In the US, he's one of the top 5. If you look at that top 5, you have to go a long way down to find the kind of podcast I was just describing that represent alternative to a celebrity-driven culture. Obviously, celebrities who are known across a range of media draw more people in than academics or activists or others who are building their reputation through the podcast medium. But I think the survival and persistence of those alternative uses suggests to me that we really hunger for programming that's a little more culturally specific, tailored to our identity and interest, than the mainstream radio world has offered us in the past. And so I don't see that going away either.

Andrew, any thoughts on where podcasts are heading?

Oh, well, I mean, I think the, the trend will hold true that you know, things start out in a niche, they get picked up and popularized, then they get commercialized, then they get boring. So people find a new way to do it that's more interesting, and the cycle resets. We could be there already with podcasting. I'm not sure. But one interesting facet that occurred to me, which you mentioned about to do with timing, is I noticed a little while ago that instead of simply having a series up and ready to go, Netflix and other streaming services now do premieres, debuts, and that switches the dynamic from, you know, personal consumption to again a group activity, a sense of belonging so that, you know, I know that me and my friends are all going to be gathered around whatever device consuming this content at this time. And that's a whole other dynamic and layer of richness to an experience. And it's something that concerns our identity and our sense of belonging as well. So I think that's going to become more and more a factor in all of these kinds of activities as well, just because the richness, the depth of experience is, I think, something we all crave.

So just as we wind this up now, this bit before we close on final thoughts on identity, I just wanted to ask you, we've talked a lot about sort of innovations and change in some of these media and it's obviously its effects on identity, but more broadly than that, what do you think we're leaving behind as the media landscape changes, as we've seen some of the dynamics that you have, you know, both articulated? Are there certain things of value that we are leaving behind? That potentially forever. Henry, what do you think?

Well, I don't know that we're leaving it behind fully or permanently, but the sense of liveness is one of the things that radio, say, has going for it. So I was playing in class this week Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London during the Blitz, and then the Hindenburg fire explosion. And then I was trying to ask my students, what are the moments that they experienced simultaneously with an entire nation that had a dramatic effect for them? And I started out with the Challenger explosion and quickly realized, no, they are too young for that. So I tried 9/11, and really this group was too young to remember the Twin Towers hitting. They knew the aftereffects of it, but that was not simultaneously that was diffused. So the closest we could get was following the election results between Trump and Biden, which isn't a tragedy, not from my point of view anyway, but it was, uh, or the maybe the insurrection for Americans was that moment of simultaneous experience of national news. But I think in the world of podcast, which is not about liveness, but is always recorded before it's dispersed. It's hard to get there. Occasionally webcasting for a small niche for protest gets you that, but not the national scale of it. So I think there's something about experiencing something together that in a post-three network era and a post-broadcast era we are, we're losing. That comes closer to what I think Marshall McLuhan meant by the global village than the internet version, which, you know, I think he was— when he was talking about electronic media, he was talking about television, radio for the most part, right? Unless he knew something most of the rest of us didn't at the time he made some of those statements.

Yeah, that's interesting. Your question as to what's lost and what's gained. The forging of a new identity is always an exchange. You know, you always leave something behind to build something new or you create something out of the ashes of your old identity. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, maybe a bit of both. I think we have a lot of choice. You know, some people refuse to move on and get stuck in whatever identity or period they find more comfortable. For myself, I know I have a hard time letting go of some things, but it's a matter of trade-off and you're always going to have to I think sacrifice something to gain something else. I'm hearing sirens in the background and living where I do in the country—

Oh, that's downtown LA, yes.

That's amazing.

That's an immersive media experience.

Yes, and that's from the 11th floor, by the way.

Wow. You know, and this is the identity that I've come to assume and take for granted is this guy living in the country when I used to be a kid living in the city and taking the subway way and going to punk rock shows and whatever. And sure, that's still a part of me, and it's made who I am today, you know, I'm built on the ashes of those identities. But yeah, I think the trick is to hold on to what's important and not lose sight of those things in our eagerness to move ahead in some name of progress.

So just to draw to a close, then I'm going to ask you a question that I ask all the guests at, at the end of these podcast episodes, which is: what action for identity should we take? And, and I'm thinking now in a media environment. And really what I mean by that is what kinds of media or ways in which we use media would strengthen our ability to either find or discover or explore our own identities? I'll leave you for a second to think about that while I just remind our listeners that I'll be speaking at the next TBD conference on March 31st. It's Technology, Behavior, and Data. The theme this year is hope and expectation of the future. From big tech to activists, scientists to slam poets, TBD isn't like other conferences. As they say, it's fast and it goes for the throat. So join me and 30 other speakers there with 25% off your ticket today. All you need to do is use Future of You at the checkout over at thetbdconference.com. So visit thetbdconference.com and pick up your discounted ticket today. Okay, I'm gonna return to Andrew and Henry. Andrew first, any thoughts on that question about action for identity in the media landscape?

Well, I mean, the thing to keep in mind is that our identities are always going to be developing, under assault, changing, morphing. That's just a fact of life today. The best thing I think you can do is try and be conscious about it. Know that that's happening. Ask yourself what your identity is, what it means to you, and more specifically, what's important to you. Write it down if you have to, you know, and hold on to it. I think there's a lot we can preserve if we want to, but it's so easy to lose sight of these things. Because again, things happen so fast and we move on. And, you know, as they say, you can never, you know, step in the same stream twice. But I think we can hold on to things in good ways, you know, not in necessarily bad ways. So ask yourself who you are, who you want to be, and just hold on to that.

Good advice. Henry?

Well, I'm white, I'm cis, I'm male, I'm American. I belong to identities that are dominant in my culture, and I have a pretty clear sense of what those identities are. What I worry about is the history of my identities imposing themselves on other people. So I'm at a point in my life, I'm 63, that I'm interested in hearing other people talk about their identities so that I understand the identity distinctions my students are making for themselves. Themselves more deeply. And the place I go to do that is podcasting, because I can find podcasts which are conversations among Black people or among Asian people or among Muslim people or whatnot, and hear a conversation that I would not be able to directly encounter in everyday life and really actively listen. And yes, I probably start out with a certain degree of ignorance, or confusion. I'm exposed to things that I would never have even thought to ask about, but I gradually develop a deeper understanding. I never assume I fully get it, but I do get closer. And that saves a lot of wear and tear on my students, who as people— minority citizens— often grapple with the labor involved in explaining their identity over and over and over again every day to someone else. I'm listening to someone who's chosen to explain their identity either within their own community or beyond. And of course, medium like podcasting, it's always to some degree beyond. And that helps me to understand identity in the modern world at a much deeper level. So just listening to well-chosen podcasts and use those to spark real conversations with real people. In your life is the path I would recommend.

That's amazing. That's just fantastic advice from both of you. I think I'm right in saying that Marshall once said a dog, having a dog helps you define or understand your own identity. Is that not right, Andrew? Because the dog knows who you are. Maybe even if you don't, the dog recognizes you and knows who you are.

Well, at the beginning of the pandemic, my son moved in with us with a dog. And so I was out walking the dog in the streets in my neighborhood that I've lived in for 15 years, and I met so many people walking the dog that I did develop a sense of my community walking the dog, if not my identity.

The thing about the dog is the dog doesn't rely on its eyes. It relies on its nose. And this is another part of your identity is that your, your scent is a part of your identity that doesn't come through the screen here. But this is how the dog knows who you are. And this is something very integral to who you are, which may not be how you identify or how you wish to identify, but it is basic to yourself. And that's your physical body, which is something that's easy to lose sight of when we spend all our time interacting through screens as if we were visiting each other in jail. But, you know, one last thing to keep in mind about identity is that it's largely created and you have the option or ability to take a hand in that creation. And that is worth considering.

Wise words. Thank you so much to both of you. It's been a real privilege to speak to both of you together and, and hear both perspectives on a whole range of issues. I can't wait to listen to it back, actually. There's so much in there. Thank you to both of you.

Thank you.

Thank you.