Neil Verma's "Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession"

Neil Verma is Assistant Professor of Sound Studies in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. His books include Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics and American Radio Drama (2012) and, as coeditor, Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (2020) and Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship (2016).

Verma applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is odd to read on its own. It lands in the middle of a digression about two phases of critiques that writers made of the landmark podcast Serial, whose debut season featured a study of the murder trial of Adnan Syed in Maryland.

On this page I summarize features in the first phase of critiques, which appeared soon after the popular show was released in 2014. In this phase, writers who felt critical of Serial often argued (a) that the reporters failed to engage in broader, more systemic critiques of the criminal justice system, (b) that the lure of compelling characters led podcasters away from ethical journalism, and (c) that the practice of focalizing events through a reporter was inherently suspicious. On that last point, I write about my concept of “audioposition,” which I developed in my earlier book on classic radio drama, Theater of the Mind. Audioposition is a little like the equivalent of “point-of-view;” it is intended to name where we are according to what we hear. I write about it this way on the page: “In true crime […] we ‘are’ usually on a reporter’s desk, in her car, and at her home; often she literally has us in the palm of her hand ‘inside’ her portable recorder moving through a space.” The use of very obvious audiopositioning makes some listeners feel manipulated, and you can understand why: “Any narrative device that betrays rhetorical emphasis on audioposition immediately calls to critical attention other possible audioposition that the piece did not elect to take […].”

Would readers turning to page 99 get a good idea of the overall book? Sort of. My book is about narrative podcast aesthetics from 2014 to about 2020. In it, I study several hundred shows to reveal how podcasts developed a common feeling (usually that feeling is obsession), how they staged searches for knowledge, and how they often seemed so disconnected with predecessors as to seem amnesiac. Page 99 has little to say about all that. However, the book nests my ideas about affect, knowledge and memory within contemporaneous historical critiques. The book also models technical ways to analyze podcasts, such as using pitch-tracking and audioposition analysis. On the latter points, page 99 would give you a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Learn more about Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession at the University of Michigan Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue