Why I Don’t Like Podcasts

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with various people, and I figured I’d get it written down. I don’t like podcasts. This is not because I have some concealed Luddite tendencies, nor because I’m looking for something popular to dislike and be controversial over.

Putting it simply, podcasts are slow, irritating, and inconvenient - a step backward from the efficiency of text. No, I don’t like radio either.

Slow: I can read way faster than anyone can talk. I can read the transcript of a podcast in less than a quarter of the time it takes to listen to it, and that assumes the speakers aren’t stopping to hem, haw and um their way through a conversation. My time is valuable to me - give me the transcript.

Irritating: With at least one podcast I listened to a while back - and this was a twenty-something Irish male - if you removed the word “like” from the stream, it would have been about half as long. Other accents can be difficult to understand, or just plain unpleasant, and people who are perfectly well able to express themselves in text end up incomprehensible in speech. Sound quality isn’t always what it might be, and having to listen very carefully to make out what someone is saying is, well, an irritation.

Inconvenient: First, I have to get the podcasts onto some piece of equipment where I can hear them. Since listening to voice takes a huge amount of my attention, I can’t do that in work, and I usually have better things to do at home, so it has to be something portable. I have a small MP3 player, but the rigmarole of downloading the file and transferring it to the player and so on is tiresome. Then, unless I actually am concentrating all the time, I miss bits. I can’t just look back up the page; I have to rewind a bit, and hope I got the right spot. Neither can I easily flick forward through the bits I’m not interested in. “45 minutes in” is no use unless I can see a timer, and my MP3 player doesn’t have one. For that matter, finding 45 minutes in on Winamp involves messing with a slider.

So, in essence: give me writing, dammit. Sound is for conversation and music.