2016 - Corner Mindscape

Supplementing ‘Serial’: Should a Podcast Be More Than Sound?

19th October 2016 by William Corner

Redefining Radio

The great thing about radio is that you can listen to it while doing something else – no need to remain stationary and fix your eyes on a glowing rectangle, or a paper one for that matter. With a podcast, essentially a downloadable or streamable radio show, you have the added benefit of listening whenever you want. I have spent countless hours listening to web design podcasts such as Shoptalk Show and Boag World while cleaning the bathroom or washing dishes. In a world where our attention is constantly divided and drained, I can still listen to two people talk for an hour or more every week, often on a very specific topic, because their disembodied voices are able to follow me around – or out of – the house. This is surely one of the main reasons why the grand-daddy of broadcast mediums has found a comfortable place in 21st century digital life.

The term ‘podcasting’ may well have been coined by Ben Hammersly in this Guardian article from 2004. 2004 was very much still the age of the iPod and although the iPod and iTunes have popular associations with the name and medium, podcasts are device-agnostic – most of them are simply mp3 audio files.

One of the key differences between a pure podcast and a radio show is the way in which the form and content of a podcast are shaped by the independent nature of its production. Podcasters embody the same frontier enthusiasm as bloggers, often independently producing shows focused on topics that would be too niche for mainstream airtime, circumventing the traditional gatekeepers of this airtime to occasionally reach global audiences. Despite this new freedom, I would argue it has taken podcasts backed by conventional broadcast media to push the idea of ‘listening to a podcast’ into the mainstream.

My first encounter with podcasting happened around 2006. I was living in Japan and would scrub my cubicle toilet while listening to BBC radio programmes such as Melvin Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’. These were broadcast radio shows streamed on-demand through BBC iPlayer. With the rise of on-demand media of all kinds, the boundaries between conventional radio and podcasting have become increasingly blurred. The BBC publishes its radio content as podcasts on iTunes as well as on BBC iPlayer. This 2016 article from The Guardian gives a list of selected podcasts, with a mix of mainstream broadcast and independent productions. Since 2006 I have produced a podcast series for English language teachers and the pilot episode for a fictional drama about English teachers in Japan – the former a company-sponsored show aimed at a very specific professional group, the latter a product of the DIY ethos.

Human Interest

Along with radio programmes on BBC iPlayer, the hybrid format of broadcast/podcast can be found in This American Life, an on-air Chicago Public Radio show and also one of the most popular podcasts in the world. The show is hosted by Ira Glass, a seasoned broadcaster with a knack for creating narrative tension through his natural, unforced delivery – a practised style which, by his own admission, took him many years to perfect. Each episode hangs a loose theme over various human interest stories, offering a mixture of surprise, humour and self-reflection, often with a socially conscious dimension to it. The reason why This American Life tops the charts is no-doubt a reflection of the type of general audience that listen to podcasts. Another similar hybrid radio show/podcast is Radiolab from New York Public Radio. Radiolab is more experimental in its use of soundscapes and audio effects. While the topics are broadly science-based, the show still focuses on storytelling through personal testimony and the lively banter of the hosts.

I have already written about how text can be transformed by web technologies. A simple example of how this relates to podcasting is the way in which This American Life publishes both a clean version of the show where strong language is bleeped out along with an uncensored version – something that would be impossible with conventional broadcasting. The show’s website also offers some basic additional material for those interested in creating their own podcast, featuring video clips of the makers, including Glass, talking about the practice of finding, researching and telling a good story.

What Happens Next?

In 2013, the producers of This American Life created the Serial podcast. Unlike its parent show, Serial was only available through the web, with iTunes being the most prominent distribution channel. The show has been marked out as the tipping-point for the podcast as a form of popular media, achieving the kind of public recognition (and, indeed conventional media coverage) reserved for films and TV shows. The obvious litmus test for Serial is whether or not you have heard of it. Serial has been featured everywhere from Buzzfeed to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. By contrast, the interactive article ‘Snow Fall’ was mainly talked about by the web community. Even if you are interested in web storytelling, you are far less likely to have heard of it, than the Serial podcast.

When I first heard about Serial I mistook it for an elaborate work of online fiction. I also thought that it would involve a significant amount of extended multimedia content. I made these two assumptions based on the layout of the website which featured a map of a convenience store and a number of links inviting you to explore further evidence. I thought it was perhaps some whodunnit which would involve the listener/user working out clues. This wasn’t too far from what the show actually turned out to be.

The first series of Serial presented one true-life story concerning the brutal murder of a high school girl and the inconclusive case against her already convicted and imprisoned boyfriend. Although the event occurred back in 1999, the show’s producers had made contact with a campaigner who was trying to get the case reopened. Serial’s journalists carried out a live investigative report with new details emerging every week. The show’s popularity was down to this ‘real-time’ investigative journalism deploying the same polished storytelling techniques as This American Life. In particular, these techniques involve a kind of zooming out from and then into the different aspects of the story – standing back for a moment to explore the wider context or peering in to examine a particular moment in time.

The Reddit Transformation

While there was kind of virtuoso journalism being carried out by the show’s host and principle journalist, Sarah Koenig, the show also raised many questions about journalistic ethics. In particular, the popular discussion website Reddit became host to speculative threads on the series with amateur sleuths trying to find and post the addresses of the people involved in the case. One of the main characters under scrutiny went to online feature website The Intercept to tell his own side of the story. In a similar way to ‘Snow Fall’, we are on a perilous edge, creating compelling and innovative content out of real personal tragedy – in this case we also have an unwelcome dredging up of the past as people who had attempted to put the murder to the back of their minds were suddenly asked or felt compelled to answer questions over the phone or on their doorstep, even if this was done in the spirit of challenging a possible miscarriage of justice. True life stories – particularly tragic ones – are perhaps the most engaging but also the most delicate to handle. The unofficial digital transformations of Serial’s investigation via Reddit meant that this sensitivity was taken out of the hands of the producers and displaced into the rowdy, unaccountable and often anonymous milieu of the internet discussion forum. The prominence of Reddit discussion should be included as part of Serial’s impact and certainly went a large way to foregrounding the more controversial aspects of its presentation.

Dreaming of a Bigger Picture

With ‘Series 2’ there is more of an attempt to make the Serial website into a multimedia experience, now even closer to what I initially mistook Serial to be. Exhibiting a similar but less-experimental inter-connectivity to ‘Kafka’s Wound’, we have a ‘central text’ of audio episodes linked to supplementary content fragments. There are interactive maps similar to those seen in ‘Snow Fall’, infographics showing army uniforms, along with additional audio and video clips. The extra material adds further context to the episodes but comes across as peripheral. There is no tight integration between the listening experience and the browsing experience. I find that listening to a podcast episode and browsing the serial website are two distinct activities – the listener and user are split, so one does not displace your attention to the other, whereas reading an interactive article like ‘Snow Fall’ is more integrated, but perhaps more in danger of displacing attention.

The supplementary material is perhaps necessary to an extent since the topic is way more ambitious and convoluted than Series 1. We move from a small-town murder that became a national news story because of the show to a national news story that taps into wider issues of American foreign policy and international affairs. Serial 2 takes up the case of Sgt Bow Bergdahl, an American soldier captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan and held in solitary confinement as a hostage for over five years before being released in a hostage trade deal, only then to be labelled as a deserter who had caused many problems over the years for the ground troops tasked with locating him.

Koenig does not interview Bergdahl directly but plays excerpts from his recorded phone conversations with filmmaker Mark Boal who interviewed him while gathering material for a screenplay. At one point Koenig interviews a key member of the Taliban who claimed to have captured and held Berghdahl in Afghanistan. Many of the later episodes ‘zoom out’ to wade through the mire of American politics and diplomacy. While series 2 has plenty of time to tell its story, including a two-part episode released in the same week, it struggles to keep the focus on the network of relationships and character portraits which I imagine appealed to many listeners of the first series. The show’s producers commissioned distinctive animated artwork from Carl Burton to create a sense of imaginary space for each episode – a visual cue for listening. These images have a dreamlike quality and for me recall the stylised Flash animation of the film Waltz with Bashir. The effect is radically different to reading about the events on a conventional news site. I think this was partly an attempt to evoke the digital impressionism of 3D video games – something to do with locating the podcast as part of a wider contemporary experience.

While Serial may have succeeded in raising the profile of the podcast as a form of mainstream media it does not transform the podcast into something radically different from a conventional radio show – and that might be a good thing considering the fragmentary experience of the supplementary material. Meanwhile, the independent podcasts with their quirky non-mainstream obsessions will continue to attract their niche audiences.

If you have not listened to Serial season’s 1 or 2 yet, I will leave you to do so without dissecting the final outcome. You can find more than enough dissection elsewhere on the web.

Key Links

Rocking ‘The Boat’: Websites and Interactive Graphic Novels

10th January 2016 by William Corner

Websites and Comics: Joining the Dots

Websites have more in common with comics than you might imagine:

both employ words and pictures in various strategic combinations within the confines of a (usually frame-based) layout,
both rely on the careful design of that layout to guide the eye from one element to the next,
and, controversially, both cater for shorter attention spans than commonly required for longform reading.

The relationship is close enough for comic theorist Scott McCloud’s book, ‘Understanding Comics’ (and also the sequel ‘Reinventing Comics’) to be held up by several web designers as providing greater insight into their field than many books on web design. While short comic strips such as those found on xkcd and The Oatmeal adapt themselves fairly well to the web, often presented exactly as they would be in print, attempts to transform the comic on the web have traced a faint line between enhanced experience and distracting gimmick.

McCloud, a widely-regarded authority on comics, wrote about this issue in a 2009 blog post where he drew attention to the self-referential experimentation of French comic artist Yves Bigerel, exploring how storytelling could be enhanced through a proper attention to the possibilities afforded by the web, particularly the ability to reveal elements and overlay frames in interesting and surprising ways. Bigerel’s DeviantArt showcase is illustrative of the playful, cheeky and subversive culture which has often surrounded the art form. The experiments were created using Adobe Flash, which, due to its proprietary nature and lack of mobile device support, has since been abandoned in favour of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. McCloud does not agree with all of these ideas – his own key suggestion, touched on here in this TED talk, is to employ an ‘infinite canvas’ – expanding the flow of words and pictures in a way that is uninhibited by the conventions of the page or even the dimensions of the screen. A recent take on the infinite canvas can be found in Rachel Nabors’ proof-of-concept, ‘Alice in Videoland’. Nabors’ goal was to show that using the power of modern web browsers, McCloud’s ideas could now be implemented by people with a range of skill-sets without going too deep down the rabbit hole of one particular discipline.

Heightened Perceptions: Reality and Caricature

While I do not usually read episodic comics, I have read a number of so-called ‘graphic novels’, including From Hell, Persepolis, Maus, Palestine, Logicomix and, most recently, Alice in Sunderland. Most of these works are based on re-interpreting historical characters and events. The ‘graphic novel’ monicker has been applied to longform superhero or fantasy comics which aim at a more mature or sophisticated exploration of character and theme and there is some controversy over its use in marketing by publishers who may wish to disown the term, ‘comic’ altogether.

From reading my very particular selection of historical/biographical comics, here’s what I’ve come to believe: the freedom allowed in comic art to creatively reshape perception through graphic illustration, allows for a kind of heightened attention to how things are perceived in general. Since comics tend to visually re-shape the world more aggressively than photographs and live-action film, they function as a caricature of ‘realist’ perception (perhaps that is why they are sometimes seen as only appropriate for the untamed perceptions of children). This is why, for me, an animated film like Waltz with Bashir (which was made in part using Adobe Flash), can create a sense of ‘heightened perception’ – small details impact with an intensity that would be lost if they were presented in a more conventionally ‘realistic’ way (in the case of Waltz with Bashir this ‘heightened perception’ is thrown into relief with a sudden lurch into live-action documentary video). To look upon a particular railing or wine bottle, the dirt on a window or the crease of a brow, conveyed through the hand and eye of an artist, can provoke greater reflection on how we experience the world. This, of course, is no major news – it is readily applied to our reactions to impressionist or expressionist painting – in fact, any form of painting or visual art, but it is not always applied to storytelling through illustrations, which is why comics and animations have had a fight (in some countries, at least) to be recognised as ‘serious’ forms of art. Japan is, of course, often held up as a culture that embraces the impressionistic possibilities of graphic illustration in manga and anime, running the full gamut from science-fiction through pornography to romance and historical drama.

Creative Friction: Writing ‘The Boat’

And so we come to the ‘interactive graphic novel’, ‘The Boat’, commissioned by the Australian broadcaster SBS, and launched in Spring 2015. ‘The Boat’ was originally a short story written by prize-winning Australian author Nam Le and published back in 2008. It relates the journey of a Vietnamese girl as she is smuggled out of Vietnam and onto a refugee boat bound for Australia. The story is part of a collection, also called ‘The Boat’, a product of the creative friction of Le choosing to move against his instinctive rejection of writing ‘immigrant stories’ – a process which puts a meta-fictional spin on the ‘ethnic voice’ as being somehow inherently more authentic and therefore worthy of the attention of literary publishers. Is there any irony then, in the fact that a story embedded in a work of self-reflective post-colonial literature has ended up as a showcase for cutting-edge digital storytelling, commissioned by a national broadcaster? The project was commissioned for the 40th Anniversary of the fall of Saigon and was intended to give weight to the foundation narrative of the Vietnamese diaspora.

We should pause for a moment to consider why what might be considered more ‘worthy’ subject matter gets, quite rightly, green-lighted for web-based storytelling projects? Most likely it is because of the way that storytelling content presented on a website does not have the mass audience appeal of more ‘conventional’ digital media (videos, ebooks, mp3s) which people will pay to stream or download. Examples of web-based storytelling with high production values are often non-commercial projects funded by cultural institutions or straight-out advertising campaigns. An example of the former is The educational website for ‘Ice and Sky’, an expensively produced and freely available exercise in web-based storytelling, which explains the origins of climate change science (and which also happens to start with a boat at sea). In contrast, we have an advert for the Peugeot Hybrid 4 (a high-profile proof-of-concept advert showcased on many web design sites) and a Christmas campaign for Welsh public transport.

Motion Sickness: Animating Words and Pictures

‘The Boat’ provokes a strong sense of internal space and perception of the external world. This ‘heightened perception’ very much fits the creative re-shaping I mentioned earlier and is embodied in the hand-painted sumi-e style artwork of Vietnamese-American artist Matt Huynh. Sumi-e is the Japanese black ink painting associated with zen circles, bamboo stalks and cherry trees – a style which along with ukiyo-e woodblock prints, influenced both European Impressionism and the Japanese manga style of comic art. This makes the whole experience feel more organic than is usually the case with digital comics. Strokes are broad and free, suggesting motion blur and the physical and psychological instability of the protagonists. In a similar way to Waltz with Bashir, ‘ The Boat’ places photos of a real refugee boat and Vietnamese refugees at the end of the story, juxtaposing these realist archival images with the impressionist/expressionist presentation which has come before. ‘The Boat’ makes use of the HTML5 canvas element, which provides a standardised way of manipulating complex visual layouts on a web page. This means we are moving towards websites which require recent hardware to render a smooth visual experience in a similar way to the ‘system requirements’ of video games and you may find things flow rather less well if you’re trying to view it on a 10-year-old laptop. However, the adherence to core web technologies should mean that the boat will be available to view for as long as SBS continue to host it – one of the key issues in web-based storytelling is the longevity of the technologies used.

An important enhancement of the work is the use of movement created by the parallax effect popularised in ‘Snow Fall’ and taken further here with true 3D elements (using a JavaScript library called three.js). A usability issue levelled against the parallax effect is that it causes motion sickness – the effect is disorienting, but with ‘The Boat’, I imagine that this is kind of the point. The intention of a piece of dramatic storytelling on the web may well be to move in the opposite direction from the research suggested by User Experience design in order to actively confuse and disorient the user/reader. In some sections, sentences lurch into view at unexpected angles or materialise from the background. I am reminded here of the novel, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, where paragraphs and fragments of text are re-arranged on the page to create an unfolding and disorienting sense of space. Danielewski was working with the idea that the pages of a printed book could take on the visual fabric of film and with the ‘The Boat’ we glimpse the potential (and the problems) of animating words on the screen subjected to the motion they describe.

The use of reveals and ‘beats’, indicated by Bigrel’s earlier experiments, are deployed here, but occur when you scroll down the page rather than click, the images and words flowing into view. This downwards motion gives the strong impression that you are somehow ‘descending into’ the story, creating a new form of spatial and temporal relation to narrative. Moments of tension are created with the scrolling motion when, for example, a body is thrown overboard. Sound also plays a major role in the presentation – we read about what we hear and storms and songs fade in and out in synchronicity with the visuals. The title section states that ‘Headphones are recommended’, suggesting an introspective, solitary pursuit.

‘The Boat’ website is so fully immersed in audio-visual fluidity that it might just about escape the accusation of trying to digitally enhance any conventional reading experience. It could also qualify as embodying some of what Scott McCloud has meant by the idea of an ‘infinite canvas’. While this does not establish a new paradigm, it makes a provocative case not only for how a comic or graphic novel can be transformed by the digital medium but also for what can be done in the emerging sphere of interactive web-based literary production.

This article is part of a blog series about Storytelling and web design.