Podcasting

About a year ago I gave up listening to talk radio. In general I preferred it to listening to music on the FM stations. Nothing against music, I just felt like I was learning something when I listened to talk radio and music, although enjoyable, just seemed like background noise. Well after a couple of tests I realized that talk radio was just becoming background noise for me as well. It had gotten so that I could predict almost exactly how each of the local talking heads would spin the latest news story. After years of listening to them it finally dawned on me that they were never saying anything new. The only thing they were good for was to turn every complicated, multi-faceted news story into a one dimensional little catch phrase that was easier for their average listener to understand and agree with. Rarely if ever did I hear any deep insightful discussions on all the different points of the issues. I’d just grown tired of it all.
That being said I really enjoyed the talk format when it was being honest and really examining issues that are important to me. Since the Atlanta market is dominated by conservative talk stations if I wanted to hear anything different it was either NPR, sports talk, or Christian sermons. Of these choices I went with NPR. I like the fact that they spend more time on the stories that may not be as flashy as the stories that lead the other news stations but in the long run are much more varied and personally I feel more important.
Even with this I still began looking for something else. I enjoy examining philosophy, religion, science, and politics. I set out to find some form of media that would provide what I was thirsting for. My first rescuer came in the form of books on CD. I checked out just about every book I could from the local library on CD. I still regularly listen to around 3 or 4 books a month.
Soon after that I discovered podcasting. Within a couple of month I found days worth of audio online that dealt with exactly the same type of issues that I had been struggling with for years. Everynight I download sevaral hours of new podcasts and then listen to them while I’m CADing away at work. I really enjoy it and I feel much more educated and informed than I ever did listening to conservative talk radio. Even when I agreed with them talk radio either bored me or made me really upset. My current selection of podcasts are never boring and all to frequently they are profoundly enlightening. I don’t see me turning back to broadcast talk radio anytime soon.
Here are a few of the podcasts that I’ve been listening to in the past year:
http://radio.seti.org/
http://www.astronomycast.com/
http://www.pennfans.net/category/Audio_Archive/PennRadio/
http://www.theskepticsguide.org
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?page_id=72%22