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Have podcasts benefited from the decline of third places?

Podcasts don’t have anything to do with the disappearing of third places, but they are perhaps where people turn to fill the gap in their absence.

Have podcasts benefited from the decline of third places?

[Photo:
Jonathan Farber
/Unsplash]

BY Fast Company Staff6 minute read

The week before his death in 2014, New York Times media critic David Carr moderated a panel at the New School about Serial and other big-name podcasts. Speaking to Alex Blumberg about a moment of humor during an episode of his podcast, StartUp, he described hearing the audio of Blumberg’s wife’s laughter.

“No print reporter anywhere could describe that laugh,” Carr said. “It just has to unfurl. She’s a good laugher, by the way.”

At a time when Serial’s runaway success suggested that the future of podcasting was in deeply reported narrative series, Carr was actually on to something when he zeroed in on a detail as subtle as the recorded sound of laughter. Nearly a decade later, podcasts are a self-contained industry, and many of the most profitable ones are taking a simpler tact: people with a rapport talking and joking about stuff.

The ensuing demand has birthed the creation of podcast networks and conglomerates. The Ringer, a publication whose business platform seems to simply leverage its (often very good) written content into credibility for its podcasts, sold to Spotify in 2020 for $250 million. Alex Blumberg’s Gimlet studio sold for $230 million. Headgum, Earwolf, Vox Media, Pineapple Studios, and Meadowlark Media are all media companies that deal either exclusively in podcasts or have made enormous investments in the medium. Celebrities—athletes, musicians, actors—have gotten into podcasting despite already having lucrative careers.

In most cases, all this money thrown around isn’t necessarily in an attempt to create a podcast that will be the topic of conversation among gathering friends. Instead, they are succeeding by partially replacing that dynamic for many Americans.

If it seems odd that an innovation that does not seem all that innovative is having such massive financial success and helping shape cultural conversations, it might be worth looking toward the continued diminishment of what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places”: the concept of people converging leisurely in environments that are neither home nor work.

Podcasts don’t have anything to do with the disappearing of third places, but they are perhaps where people turn to fill the gap in their absence.

In his 1989 book, The Great Good Place, Oldenburg describes third places as settings “where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances.” These backdrops can take plenty of forms—city park gatherings, block parties, musical concerts, barbecues, libraries, church events. No matter the specifics, their roles have one commonality: to create and sustain community.

A paper published by the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University in 2009 stated that a third place “provides the feeling of inclusiveness and belonging associated with participating in a group’s social activities.”

These places have been diminishing over the decades. In 1996, Oldenburg would write that the means to get to know one’s neighbors have been eliminated and that vanishing third places “signal the flaw in much of today’s residential land use pattern—all space is used up and there is no provision for community life.”

Likewise, many growing cities’ current aversion to density has created urban spawls and a dependence on cars. No one accidentally drives somewhere. Foot traffic in a city square or downtown, on the other hand, can create happenstance activities or encounters. Euclidean zoning laws divide land so that residential and commercial properties are kept separated. And parking has proven more costly, inconvenient, and dangerous than public transit.

To whatever degree third places do still exist, rising costs of activities outside one’s home and growing economic inequality make participating in them a vexing financial decision, especially for Americans who don’t live in big cities where mixed-use neighborhoods and convenient public transit are more common. Even third places that were already rooted in commerce—i.e., the coffee shop, book store, or diner—are either diminishing as a result of online shopping or gentrification, or used the opportunity of the pandemic to disincentivize (perhaps permanently) the profit-slowing dynamic of patrons socializing. Starbucks has stopped selling newspapers, removed its tables, and put lock codes on public restrooms.

To be sure, an argument could be made that the internet has become a third place, but a fair modern interpretation of the term might define such spaces as a break or reprieve from the internet’s infiniteness (and toxicity), similar to the way they might have been an escape from the demands of work. Meanwhile, the lines between work and socialization continue to blur online.

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Finally, what is expected out of American laborers to meet rising costs of living drains many people of the energy to participate in anything that requires leaving the house.

What’s being lost here is community, but also a necessary salve of the stress all this brings. Research has shown that regular and spontaneous social interaction reduces depression levels and can help lower your risk of dementia. To have like-minded people to joke around with is an enormous relief in life. When you spend all your time working, driving, or figuring out how to get by, then a podcast might just have to fill that void.

Laughing feels good, but so does hearing laughter.

According to GWI’s Global Media Landscape report, podcasting continued to rise in 2022 and is expected to make $4 billion annually by 2024. Comedy is the most popular genre ages 16 to 44. Even a podcast in the genres of sports, film, television, or politics is likely to be ripe with inside jokes between hosts who are friends (or at least are very good at pretending to be). The shift away from prestige scripted podcasts like Serial to casual conversations with a loose theme might seem like it has more to do with a lower barrier of entry for the creator, but it may also be the path of least resistance. Perhaps, it’s the result of an unconscious demand to replicate the third places of decades past. 

Oldenberg’s definition of third places have been narrowed to a handful attributes, which taken out of context can sound like how podcast listeners might describe what they get out of their favorite podcasts. Terms like “lighthearted and humorous conversations”; “wit and good-natured playfulness”; “readily accessible”; “a number of regulars that give the space its tone,” and “the same warmth, possession, and belonging as occupants would feel in their own homes.”

A relationship formed at a third place is typically reciprocal, but a podcast creates what’s been called a “parasocial” (or one-sided) relationship that transcends what most popular talk radio hosts establish with their audience, the main difference being the completist approach most podcast listeners take, which the technology encourages. Most radio hosts understand that their audience—often commuters—is joining them at any given moment of their show. There is a specific skill required to hold the attention of someone who might park and walk into the post office in the middle of their segment causing them to miss five minutes of it. The podcast listener will press pause while they are in the post office, and most of them will listen to every episode in order regardless of whether there’s any narrative that would demand that.

They know their voices and they know their laugh, even if the hosts will never know theirs. A podcast listener told The New York Times in 2019, “I want to meet the hosts so bad. I want to be friends with them.”

My favorite podcast, Doughboys, consists of two comedians reviewing chain restaurants (which, ironically, could be considered third places). When I was a full-time freelance writer and sporadically broke, I would take long walks listening to episodes; it was an activity that didn’t cost money. I loved the jokes and cherished the laughter and looked forward to recurring guests.

Trying to unpack an episode, or even a joke, from Doughboys to my fiancée makes me sound insane. You can explain Serial to anyone. But most devotees of nonnarrative podcasts couldn’t even explain an episode to their significant other. It’s a “you had to be there” thing—but you’re not really there.

The Doughboys aren’t expected to solve any crimes or get any wrongful convictions appealed. A podcast that does that is accomplishing something impressive, no doubt. But narrative tales are not filling an untapped need. We’ve never had more of them.

What we lack is easily attainable community experiences.

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