Lounge Ruminator Episode 71: Unintended Hiatus
Martin Feld 2022

0:09  
Hi, and welcome back to Lounge Ruminator; this is Martin Feld speaking. Thank you to everyone who kept Lounge Ruminator in their podcast apps, just for keeping the RSS feed around. If you did go away, and you have come back, thank you for returning. Basically, this episode is called Unintended Hiatus, because that's exactly what happened to this show. The last episode that I published was back in January of this year, 2022, and I didn't really intend to stop or have any kind of pause on this show. It just kind of happened because things ramped up elsewhere in life, particularly things with my study, my research into open tech podcasting, and a lot of the kind of academic and ethics requirements that meant going into planning that show, which I launched, Really Specific Stories in July. So yeah, it's all excuses, I'm sorry about that, but you know what? I thought: it's getting a bit long now and I need to come back here, share some thoughts, talk about what I've been up to, and why this show hasn't really been happening very much.

1:14  
As I mentioned, earlier, in the year, I was doing some ethical work regarding Really Specific Stories, which if you haven't listened to, is my new show, which features interviews with producers and listeners from the tech podcasting genre—people who run tech podcasts, listen to them, maybe their listeners who produce their own shows. If you've been listening to any previous Lounge Ruminator episodes over the last couple of years, where I've been talking about the research that I've been doing, looking into media literature, different scholars that have something to do with podcasting and blogging, this is what it was all leading up to: planning and scaffolding the idea to have primary research through open podcasting out in the open world, that would fuel the very thesis that I'm eventually going to have to finish and submit for the doctorate.

2:04  
The ethical component is really important. And while I've spoken in previous episodes about literature review, actually finding the theories and the concepts and the ideas that fuel the research, eventually, you have to go and collect some information, you actually have to take something that becomes the new data that fuels your own research project. In any kind of research that touches human beings, whether it's fully qualitative, kind of narrative inquiry or analysis, like what I'm doing, through to medical tests, and you know, you might be taking blood or whatever, if it touches a human being, you need to actually submit something for ethical consideration and approval. Now, it is laborious, it can come across as tedious; you have to be very, very particular and nit-picky. And, yeah... if you haven't done it before—I had done it once before, for my honours research years ago at the university—it can come across as somewhat frustrating. It's like, 'Why do I have to go through all these things? I mean, I understand that I don't want to harm people'. That's super-important, but you know, 'I know what I'm doing, and I'm not going to risk anyone, so what's the big deal? Why can I put this through?'

3:15  
And sometimes you have to have revisions that makes total sense that they send it back to you and say, 'Look, you've said this, but it's not clear what you mean by that'. And it can be a bit weird or frustrating. But I have to tell you that in doing the ethics approval process, it's one of the most valuable things that I've ever done in terms of considering my own use of language, how I present my own ideas, what I mean when I'm saying things to people, because when you're seriously deep into a project, even if you think that you're explaining it clearly, even though I think I'm explaining it clearly to you now, someone might not quite get what you're saying. So when I put in an ethical report or something for consideration by a review board, and I say, 'Hey, I'm just going to be interviewing these people about their experiences in open tech podcasting, it's going to be great!' They come back to you and they say, 'OK, well, how are you going to be publishing this?' And you go, 'Oh I'm going to be putting it out into the open world!' And they go, 'Well, what are the risks to people's reputation? Are they able to edit or remove things? What what are the different bounds of this project?' Because when you think about interviewing for research, quite often this stuff is just in the background. You... yes, you get ethical approval or consent to publish this stuff, but you're refining and choosing and picking and reframing before you put it out into the world in a written thesis.

4:36  
And what I'm doing through Really Specific Stories, in asking people about their personal experiences, I'm sharing them out on the Web, through an RSS-based podcast that arrives in people's feeds before the actual research is put together. I'm intending it as an open archive so that fellow tech podcast fans or academics or people who have any interest in the medium can discover it and hear what people have to say; so there's an element of risk there, even if it has been reviewed by people, and I've been given the permission to put it out, you're putting it out there, and there could be reputational damage. So, you know, what have they said? Have they offended a certain group? You really have to be considerate that you're sharing people's stories in a way that presents them in a way that maybe they didn't expect. It's been a really interesting experience to go through that and think about how the documentation had to be put together, things that you use to approach people.

5:29  
And I don't know if you can hear stuff outside, there's a really loud bird, which is a bit of an infamous thing that happens on Hemispheric Views sometimes (my podcast with Andrew and Jason), so apologies if you can hear very loud birds in the background. Through to the actual launch of Really Specific Stories on rsspod.net, that's the site, it's been really, really interesting to hear different people and have them on the show, people sparing their time outside of their own busy lives. Because as you discover, when you talk to people who do any kind of creative project, whether it's podcasting or painting, or maybe they have a hobby in something totally different, quite often, it's in addition to whatever working or family life set-up they already have, they're filling some sort of gap that's very, very hard to keep going with the thing that they love. And the unintended hiatus of this very show is hopefully evidence of that, in a similar vein, in my role as a producer here in podcasting, as well, that you know what? I had other academic things to attend to. I've got, you know, family commitments and full-time work as well, so this very show suffered. But after a while, you kind of take stock and go, you know, what I actually have to reflect on what I've been doing, because if I don't, there's a large missing piece of my own story and the history of this very project that I'm doing.

6:47  
A major part of the very research that I've been doing is that idea of persona, that idea of people fulfilling different roles across different spaces. And that's been really interesting to explore in some of the episodes on Really Specific Stories, because as I said, there are producers and listeners. I'm trying in a very, I suppose, challenging way, this is the punishment that I've set for myself in order to be egalitarian and involving and inclusive: to basically have the same number of producers from any given podcast case study, let's say one of the ones that I've already done already is Core Intuition with Manton and Daniel (those are the hosts) to have two corresponding listeners that match their experience. Now, personas or roles, you would just think, OK, well, this is who they are or what they do on this particular site, or we understand them as a producer, and these people as listener, but it's not that clear-cut, you know? Two listeners I have on, one of them, is also a sponsor, another one is also a developer. They fulfil different roles and produce different things and put them out into the world and use that to frame their own identity, or to connect with other fans of the genre, or other things that they follow.

8:01  
So yes, I've created this kind of binary, I suppose, or have kind of reflected the way that people think of those people in this genre, in this industry. But really, people fulfil all different kinds of persona and role. And that's what I'm hoping to explore in the project: that this genre niche within the medium is full of all of these different people who contribute something to this open way of communicating, to this way of talking on tech podcasts through RSS, which, if we say goodbye to or we don't really appreciate the value of (in the face of more exclusive audio hosts), we've kind of lost an open way of communicating on the Web. And that's not to say that it's perfect or that it's the best way to communicate; it's really a one creative way to communicate through technology, about the technology that we love. And look, in launching this show, one of the things that I've really reflected on is the fact that I've essentially been practising in public. The things that you've heard here on Lounge Ruminator, the things that you might have heard on my other family-history-focused podcast, Feld Notes, which I launched through Micro.blog, that was all practising podcasts skills in public, and it's continuing now with this episode. And it was recommended by my supervisors, Dr. Kate Bowles and Dr. Christopher Moore, they said if you're going to be credible, or be able to approach different people in this genre, and want to interview them, you're going to have to have a track record of doing this stuff—of actually sharing your thoughts online, through audio. It's basically blogging but through a microphone, and I'm certainly not the first person to do this, that's not a claim that I wish to make.

9:36  
But you have to put yourself out there and actually try it. And a huge component of this has been Hemispheric Views, the show that I co-produce and co-host with my good friends, Andrew Canion and Jason Burk. I've spoken about this a few different times in different places, so sorry if you're hearing it again, but the fact that I've been able to produce what we kind of call a 'tech-adjacent' podcast—sharing jokes, sharing thoughts, sharing our own experiences with technology—we've pretty much come to create the very thing that I set out to research. And it's been so fulfilling to make friends not only with those two great guys, but also all the people out there who generously follow the show, have joined our Discord, engage with us on Micro.blog and Twitter. To actually realise this kind of persona or this role as a tech podcast producer, as a kind of member of the community that I set out to research, even if it's, you know, with a smaller following or in a small way, it's been incredibly fulfilling to launch this stuff, to produce it, to think creatively, use these different tools.

10:42  
Right now I'm recording into Audio Hijack on my Mac, I'll be, you know, exporting the files and editing and refining it through Ferrite on the iPad. This is the process that we've set out, and I've come to take all that I've learnt from the podcasts that I've already done alone and with friends and push it into this Really Specific Stories show that I've been talking about. Anyway, thanks so much for joining me for this episode. I'm going to stop talking now so that I can actually edit it and push it out and make sure that the pause isn't any longer than it already has been in the feed. So, really appreciate your patience in my return for this show and catch you next time!