During the making of our podcast episode, we decided to have one presenter for our episode as it is simpler and more straightforward. Referring to ‘From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?’ I find it interesting that the social norm back then was that young women’ voices lack authority or is simply annoying. When Jessica Grose stated that people ‘objected’ to her upspeak, mentioning that she sounded like a ‘Valley girl’, I reflected back to our group, when we decided to choose Sarah as our presenter, it was because we think she has the most natural voice. So when I compared to this broadcast, I thought if we were as big as those popular podcast and such, would we receive the same criticism as Grose?

In our group, we were given each other a symptoms of grief. Anxiety, frustration and feelings of detachment. I was given feelings of detachment and did the interview on a breakup. We all pretty much worked on our stories and combined all of them together by the end. I was given some tasks such as making a teaser for the group before us and an audiogram. I’m glad to work with my group because we stayed on tasks. I think it was when we won best overall pitch and artwork, we were motivated to do this episode.

Referring to ‘How long should a podcast be?’, some of our drafts were over the seven minute mark. I think most of us would have done the ‘selfish method’, because we wanted to add authenticity with having many pauses or screw ups. From feedback constantly given, resulted us having a decent duration, making the overall episode approximately 25 minutes. The reading states that the “average commuting time in the US is 26 minutes”, not saying our audience is targeted at the US but if a listener is commuting and listening to the podcast, I assumed it somewhat applies here when people travel.

From ‘Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media’, I think our podcast being distributed online and having its own social media is in a way a cross-media production. The convergence of media has given users to be able to like, subscribe or even share, making the listeners to be more involve and active than just listening. This would give us a reaction or thought to our episode, making them have some agency over the podcast as they can also spread to other media platforms. As the reading argues that there are other ways that people think about our podcast like reviews on Facebook. I agreed, because the reception from the audience can influence other people thoughts. The reading states about ‘constructing normalcy’, our guests’ stories, allows the listeners to understand more on the mind of human beings. The episode would create some sort of ‘normalcy’ as people would be listening to a topic that is often ignored. Overall, I’m pretty proud with our overall group’s episode as we put full effort towards this assignment.

 

References:

Cridland, J 2018, ‘How long should a podcast be?’ podnews, 6 July, viewed 17 October 2020, < https://podnews.net/article/ideal-length-of-a-podcast>

Gross, T 2015, ‘From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?’, radio program, NPR, 23 July, viewed 1 October 2020, <https://www.npr.org/2015/07/23/425608745/from-upspeak-to-vocal-fry-are-we-policing-young-womens-voices>

Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, P & Buchholtz, J.W, 2018, ‘Using a Humour Podcast to Break Down Stigma Around Illness’, in Llinares, D, Berry, R & Fox, N (eds), Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 251-265.