Other podcasts

[Mangela Lansbury]

Blogs of War, a great resource for national security stuff, recently launched Covert Contact. So far, it's been a really even-handed look at different national security issues. I don't know how many people here are into things like how to approach lone wolf terrorism or if Twitter is a fundamentally broken platform, but it's new-ish and the episodes are short so give it a try if you're into that kind of thing I guess???

[namman siggins]

Blogs of War, a great resource for national security stuff, recently launched Covert Contact. So far, it's been a really even-handed look at different national security issues. I don't know how many people here are into things like how to approach lone wolf terrorism or if Twitter is a fundamentally broken platform, but it's new-ish and the episodes are short so give it a try if you're into that kind of thing I guess???

Ohhh, this sounds awesome.

[dibs]

The more I see of Ryckert, the more my opinion of him shifts to the positive. This man is a goddamned hero. His stupid shit is amazing. Although, like Twig, I hope one day he realizes how stupid some of the political-ish things he says are, his amazing ability to follow through on dumb ideas and make them fun astounds me. I don't think a pre-Ryckert GB would have done the Mario 3 Rollercoaster challenge, for example. I really don't know if he's an idiot or a genius. He's probably both. Fantastically entertaining though.

 

I resist anyone who makes it ok to be willfully ignorant, however charming.

 

Edit: I sense Jackass coming back around again.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Wilfull ignorance is particularly an issue in the games audience where people just wanna ignore the social issues of their media.

I am also subbing to Covert Contact. I love podcasts that are about topics I know nothing of, it's a convenient way to digest information about new areas.

[miffy495]

This is why I included the aside about his politics. There is a difference between being ignorant of actual issues and problems that need addressing (not good) and enjoying dumb shit because dumb shit is fun. Ryckert is both, but he is SO GOOD at dumb shit, and at least not an asshole about not knowing problems (ie: He seems far more likely to wonder "Why doesn't that guy have a job?" than to ever be the guy yelling "GET A JOB!") that I like him. I wish he'd get informed about some things, but he is massively entertaining.

[Twig]

Courtesy of JonCole retweeting it

 

 

I continue to enjoy Serial quite a bit*. Something has been bothering me, though, and I'm too lazy to check up on it. In one of the earlier "next episode" previews (may have been the second or third episode?), there was a sound byte that mentioned "blackmail". Was this ever addressed? The next episode is all about Jay, so maybe this is where it will be addressed. Or maybe I made it up in a fever dream. Ahhh!

 

*Which feels weird because it's about a real dude who is in prison right now. And he maybe could be innocent? Or maybe not? Ahhh!

[SuperBiasedMan]

I definitely remember that happening but I think it was in the first episode or some preview thing where they had a barrage of sound clips that would come up to tantalise you. I'm guessing it'll come up in a future episode.

[prettyunsmart]

I continue to enjoy Serial each week, but the more I read about the way it's inspiring reddit investigations, the more uncomfortable I get. 

 

In other other podcasting news, Earwolf spun off one of its podcasts into a new network called Wolfpop. How Did This Get Made is routinely pretty good, so more shows like that could be a positive thing. The shows range from sounding like pretty good ideas (I Was There Too: A podcast about interviewing people who had small parts in big movies [ex. Paul F. Tompkins in There Will Be Blood]) to horribly misguided (The Sylvester Stallone Podcast, in which Paul Scheer pretends to co-host the show with Stallone who keeps cancelling on him, so instead he interviews someone who ran into him once). I have only listened to the first episode of The Canon, where two film critics argue if a particular movie should be canonical, which I found to be equal parts intriguing and off-putting.

[Twig]

I continue to enjoy Serial each week, but the more I read about the way it's inspiring reddit investigations, the more uncomfortable I get. 

Yeah, I find it similarly troubling. I was thinking about this recently, and I almost think they just... shouldn't do this. There's no way to stop people from going too far. You can't police it. Even changing people's names won't work, as someone will eventually piece it all together once you give out enough details. It's rough.

[Bjorn]

Yeah, I find it similarly troubling. I was thinking about this recently, and I almost think they just... shouldn't do this. There's no way to stop people from going too far. You can't police it. Even changing people's names won't work, as someone will eventually piece it all together once you give out enough details. It's rough.

 

But the implication there is that people shouldn't tell stories like this at all, because they can't control how people will react. That's...something I'm really uncomfortable with.

[Twig]

I didn't say I liked the solution...

 

But do you think it's better that people have their privacy violated for the sake of something they might not even remember all that well from over a decade ago?

[Bjorn]

I didn't say I liked the solution...

 

But do you think it's better that people have their privacy violated for the sake of something they might not even remember all that well from over a decade ago?

I think both options are terrible. Tell a compelling story that results in people's privacy being violated, or don't tell the story at all.

[Twig]

Yes. However, I'd argue that you can tell compelling stories about other things that won't result in people's privacy being violated. So maybe we should do that instead. I'm not happy about it, but this is a lesser of two evils kind of situation. You either lose the - this - compelling story, or a bunch of people lose their right to privacy.

 

On the other hand, if this somehow resulted in an innocent man being released from life in prison (assuming he is innocent), I'd probably suddenly be okay with a lot of it - even knowing that was never the goal of the podcast. Of course, we all know how unlikely that is.

 

...I'm not going to stop listening, of course, because I am part of the problem. Actually, to go back to a thing I half-mentioned in an earlier post... If I'm being honest, I feel sort of uncomfortable even with the idea of being entertained by Adnan's situation. Which, I definitely am. It is entertainment. But this is a real person. This is a real life. This isn't a cartoon about a boy and his dog in a post-apocalyptic magical world, or even a story about a drug-damaged detective hunting down a serial killer in Lousiana.

 

Maybe the best solution would be a "based on a true story" sort of presentation. But then the incredible value of presenting the facts as actual facts in the current incarnation is totally lost.

[Mangela Lansbury]

You should counterbalance the negative impact of the show with the positive impact of it. Just this weekend, Serial was a leaping point for a conversation about the American carceral state, and it's inspired one of my friends who's a public prosecutor to look into the feasibility of helping an innocence/freedom project. The bad side is really obvious, but the good that stories like this put into the world I'd subtler in nature.

It's a thorny little quandary, though. I haven't worked out whether or not it's ethical to consume something like Serial and I doubt I ever will.

[Twig]

Yeah it's almost always easier to see and focus on the negative sides of things, it's true.

 

In the end, I probably settle uncomfortably on the "it should be allowed to exist" side, while still acknowledging the problematic elements of it. I'm the worst.

[Bjorn]

I fully agree with Mangela that personal, true stories like this can do more to drive change and conversation about societal problems than any amount of statistics or dry information can.

But that's also walking down a path of the ends justifying the means, wherein the greater societal good outweighs individual suffering. Which leaves me feeling a bit gross, like Twig, including feelings of personal revulsion that I am being entertained by the pain of real people.

I know me though, and I will almost always error on the side of an interesting or valuable story being told rather than silencing it for the possible harm it may cause.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I don't have a very informed opinion on the ethics of posting a story like Serial, but I feel like the blame should be targeted largely at the people online that are invading others' personal space out of a compulsion to hear about a story. Ideally this mentality would be what's being addressed but it's complicated to try achieving that.

Obviously the pragmatic solution is to remove the temptation at the source by not having the show exist, but that doesn't mean it's the most ethical one. Especially when it's providing a massive positive in the experience of how broken the system can be at times to a large listening audience that might not have realised this before.

[Bjorn]

That's a good point, it is kind of crossing into the same territory as, "Well if a woman doesn't want to be catcalled, she shouldn't dress that way." Hold people responsible for their own behavior.

[Twig]

Yeah that's definitely true. It's just that at some point I feel like if I have the power to stop something bad from happening to someone else, then maybe I should exercise that power.

 

And that it's happening to someone else is the key here. The reason this is happening is not because these people woke up one day and said "I'm going to begin thoroughly investigating these people's lives for fun." It is because Serial exists and has driven them to that. Not INTENTIONALLY, of course. With catcalling it is a woman simply walking along POSSIBLY dressed provocatively but most of the times not really and there's a bunch of assholes taking it on themselves to do said catcalling. With this, it is a piece of entertainment opening up someone's personal life to the internet - and by extension, humanity - at large. The power to stop this from happening lies not with those being violated (not to say with catcalling it does, but that is a common belief/response to such complaints), but instead with a separate group investigating something that happened in those people's past.

 

I completely agree that we shouldn't be holding the creators of Serial responsible. It's not their fault. But it's not as black and white as catcalling. In my opinion.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Totally, it's more nuanced than catcalling and I'm not even sure what to think myself. I was just introducing that point since no-one else had said it (at least not directly)

[Twig]

Yeah fair enough and it's a good point.

[Merus]

I think there's a key difference between the story being ongoing and the story being complete and ready to download.

 

Generally, I put my faith in the idea that Reddit will do more harm than good. I'm reminded of the recent released of someone forced to confess by the Innocence Project; Redditors will expect a particular narrative to emerge because it is still, to them, a story, and that's likely going to end up being wrong because humans generally don't operate to narrative convention.

[Patrick R]

If only there was some contigent of Reddit that was concerned with the ethical questions that journalism raises.

[Brodie]

Jon Cole pointed me here and, from what I've read, I'm not alone in my unease. I like this show, i'm going to finish listening to it but, well, I am filled with disquiet. 

 

So, I started a separate topic to discuss this. 

[Bjorn]

PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman of WNYC's On the Media are splitting off to do their own show (which has a mysterious url of Untitled Audio). For awhile they've done their own show under the OTM umbrella called TL:DR, which tended to cover things that didn't quite fit within the scope of OTM's coverage of the media. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I'm curious to see what they come up with on their own.

 

If I haven't recommended it before, On the Media is one of my favorite shows, and if you're fascinated by the media, it's required listening.  Mostly they cover things related to journalism, but they will dip into music, movies and games on occasion.