December 12, 2004
Harvard, Podcasting, Axe Handles

I read Joshua Shimkin's account of a podcasting session at a Harvard conference and felt inspired to comment. Maybe it was the reference to Ed Sullivan that got me going.

Live Blogging: Podcasting

Click More for the text of my comment.

It sounds as if there was actually little discussion of the political implications of podcasting. One thought - The lack of metadata (transcripts, summaries, etc.) is a strength, beyond the pure experience of a performance. This is non-searchable (though eavesdroppable) web content. So beyond the "route around mainstream media" concept there is p2p communication and organizing potential with some built-in privacy.

And comparing Winer and Curry to Ed Sullivan, while evocative, doesn't make it. Ed was high vaudeville brought to our living rooms. But that didn't make us all impresarios. We couldn't all start up our own TV variety shows. A better early TV model would be Ernie Kovacs, playing with the medium instead of just putting stage shows on it.

Curry and Winer were more like early breakthrough independent filmmakers - Leacock and Pennebaker, shooting pretty girls and flower children in "Monterey Pop"? They (C&W) were just homemade and goofy enough that they established the "anyone can do it" meme from the start. Never mind that Curry's ease came from years of experience, and Winer's appeal from years of thinking about users and developers partying together. They created a format that in its glitches and flubs, its geek digressions, revealed how it was made as part of its content. No other medium has had that transparency from the start.

Now it will consolidate, and slicker productions will proliferate, but that combination of the "how" with the "what" gave it the power to take off so quickly and may be the key to its future political implications.

More philosophically:

"When making an axe handle
the pattem is not far off."

Something about the self-referential nature of podcasts and their making brings to mind the Gary Snyder poem:

Axe Handles

One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattem is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with-"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wen Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-in the
Preface: "In making the handle Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.-
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

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Posted by Dave at December 12, 2004 02:24 AM