The great globe itself
Sometimes we have these outbursts in my corner of the media world. The past few weeks, it’s been about the new “podcast” category of the Golden Globes. The winner, announced January 12, was a popular video-chat show. But the outburst concerned the fact that almost all the finalists were also video-chat shows.
“They are identical in form: the host(s) and guest(s) spend around an hour congratulating each other on their kindness, funniness and general wonderfulness,” complained The Economist.
“If we want high-quality, narrative-driven audio to survive…if we want podcasts that aren’t just celebrity chat shows with cameras, we have to reward them for existing. Awards matter. Recognition matters,” declared Jacob Reed.
The New York Times also ran an op-ed. This all seems like a lot of media attention for a seemingly minor issue while all around us rage protests, protests, protests, siege and protests. The point is, though, that podcasts also cover things like siege and protest, but Hollywood is now using its flattening powers to brand the form as just light gabbing.
The Golden Globes are never going to be The Peabodies. Professional anxieties fueled the controversy — anxieties that streaming video platforms have redefined, if not partially obliterated, the imaginative world of listening. Critics complain video dominance is already making audio sound bad. Long-time readers of Continuous Wave recognize the historical pattern here and already know how US networks made a Faustian bargain with TV in the early 1950s, after which radio emerged as a weakened and entirely different form.
Is that what’s going on today, another Faustian thing? If so, the Devil is getting a bargain. And anyway, why won’t these two forms, audio and video, be content to live side by side and serve the complementary audiences who love each one? Of course, the answer is about money, sure — but I think there’s something else at play, something unperceived. Not surprisingly, I also think that old books can shed a useful light on that.
So what follows is deep cut on video versus audio. Bear with me as I try a theory out on you. It’s the theory of magic versus circus.
Magic becomes media
My best friend (to my mind — he is dead and we’ve never met) Erik Barnouw started in radio in the 1930s as an ad-agency scriptwriter. Later he became a professor, media historian and filmmaker. But his very first job as a teenager was to catalogue the library of the magician John Mulholland. And Barnouw’s 1981 book The Magician and the Cinema applies his experience with magical lore to modern media.