I’ve listened to a few podcasts without getting excited until I heard Glenn and Helen Reynolds of Instapundit interview Peter Beinart late last week. It brought home to me that bloggers podcast, but podcasting is not blogging. A blog emphasizes an individual point of view, because it is created by one person at a keyboard. Yes, the comments are interactive and sometimes they do produce fruitful exchanges, but as we all know they tend to degenerate into bun fights and if they don’t a troll shows up to try to cause one. On the other hand, the podcast is naturally suited for interviews and interaction. There aren’t a lot of us who can do monologues like James Lilkes. It can be a one sided interview between those who think alike or a bun fight, but as a medium it starts out much more likely to involve dialog while blogging is more likely to produce monologue. Furthermore the experience is quite different than the transcript of a recorded interview. For example, because I’m too lazy to download the MP3, I often read Hugh Hewitt’s radio interviews on Radioblogger. However, the sense of personality and the tones of voice that reveal how the participants feel toward each other as the conversation progresses are missing. There are a host of other differences like the differences between the relative passivity of listening as opposed to reading and the quality of the energy and attention needed to follow a conversation as opposed to scan a line of print.

These differences between one medium and another are one of the things that McLuhan meant when he said “The medium is the message.” So I think Glenn and Helen’s interview demonstrates that there is an opportunity to develop the podcast as an more interactive adjunct to blogging. . To give the blogsphere more interactive bandwidth as it were. I don’t think the ideological hostility exploited by the American TV shows like Point Counterpoint or Fox’s Hannity and Combs are the approach that will work. They emphasize confrontation and argument – the ideological zero sum game – structured more for entertainment and ratings value than enlightenment. The odd confrontational podcast will generate the odd magic moment, but without high production values, and what a friend from Louisianan calls ‘muny,’ the entertainment value will be hard to come by for most bloggers. What most bloggers can easily do is record interactions between individuals that we would not otherwise get to hear that inform us and make us think in new ways.

Of course form is not separate from content and I have to admit that the content of this particular podcast was important for me. In my post on Friday I spoke of the interaction between the center left and the center right (or as I call them Neo-Left and Neo-Con) as the part of the political spectrum that I believe currently has the greatest potential for fruitful engagement. Glenn and Helen Reynolds interview with Peter Beinart is a clear case of center right interviewing center left. Peter Beinart is the author of The Good Fight : Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.

In content the interview is polite with similarities and differences emerging in a way that gives a perspective completely different than when either party presents their view alone. Even though the issues are touched on in a hurried and fairly superficial way, the listener can clearly hear the points in the conversation where further exploration and thinking is required by both sides. For example Beinart asserts at one point that working and lower middle class families are more financially vulnerable than in the 50s and 60s. Helen immediately answers that that contradicts her experience working with that same demographic who she she finds are generally doing very well. Beinart’s rejoinder is that the issue is less absolute income than it is the financial fragility caused by a less stable employment environment as shown by the increases in bankruptcies. Bingo..the issue moves on. We begin to look at both increased wealth and increased financial vulnerability rather than the liberal concerns with poverty and income redistribution and the conservative point that economic growth makes everyone better off. We have an increase in understanding of the issues. Fruitfulness instead of an exchange of ideological artillery that gets us nowhere.

But to come back to the medium itself for a moment, the experience of listening to a podcast is completely unlike reading Instapundit or any other blog. For reasons I still have to think about more, podcasts have subtle differences from radio shows. Some things are obvious like radio is ephemeral and of the moment. Serendipity plays a big part in what we hear. Podcasts are something you intentionally download because they touch a personal interest and you can listen when convenient. It doesn’t matter that you can often download radio because that isn’t the primary way of experiencing the medium. Overall, I would say that podcasts will make a lot more information available that doesn’t have to be packaged to pay its way with advertising. Just like blogging it makes a larger range of opinion available and erodes the monopoly of institutional opinion makers. Now if I can just con that Nigerian guy who wants my bank account number into an interview.