Audio killed the video star
Written by
Howy JacobsThe world of media has been in constant flux for over a century, with print successively supplanted by radio, broadcast TV, cable, DVDs, streaming, internet-based video and, most recently, podcasts. These are essentially the same as radio once was, though delivered by different means and available on demand rather than dictated by someone else’s scheduling. In effect, sound is making a comeback, perhaps because everyone is just too busy to watch much online content. Audio can simply be played it in the background, while one attends to other tasks.
While academic publication has largely ignored these trends, or co-opted them to preserve the feel and format of the traditional learned article, we need to follow where they lead if we are to communicate effectively with the general public. Above all inform them of what we have found out using the research funds they provided to us via state or charitable funding agencies. This is of course not just an obligation, but also in our own interests, so as to maintain and preferably grow public confidence and esteem, inform policymakers and all other stakeholders of the difference between truth, falsehood and wishful thinking, and stem the tide of misinformation. But what is the best way to do it?
Podcasts are cheap to produce, easy to disseminate and don’t require much in the way of technical infrastructure. The most successful of them usually involve dialogue between two or more regular presenters, sometimes including extended interviews with third party experts. A great example from the world of science communication is ‘The Rest is Science’, fronted monthly by Cambridge mathematician Hannah Fry and content creator Michael Stevens. There are others more focused on life sciences or medicine, and a growing number in languages other than English. The best of them are unscripted, or only very loosely researched and programmed, so that they come over as a spontaneous dialogue, with errors, malapropisms, mispronunciations and all the other common defects of everyday speech. Which makes them seem all the more real and accessible – serious mistakes can always be corrected in a subsequent episode. And there are many formats that can be envisaged and trialled.
Having dabbled in science documentary production – which, don’t get me wrong, definitely still has its place, most people don’t realize how hard it is nowadays to fund and market such endeavours and end up with a high-quality product. Moreover, documentaries tend to reach only a minority of potential viewers – those who already have some interest in the topic. Few people nowadays sit to watch an entire evening of TV output, that someone else has put together for their entertainment and edification.
One issue that almost all academic scientists face is our need to ‘speak to slides’. Personally I prefer to use slides for illustration, rather than to show the actual words that I’ll speak. But the slides still provide a crucial prop for the speaker and to some extent for the audience too. Asking a graduate student to speak for 20 minutes to explain their work without slides usually induces a state of near panic. But this is a skill we should definitely be learning and teaching. Once well practised, it lends itself very much to podcast format. It’s possible to imagine a future in which science podcasts flood the ‘airwaves’, bringing a balanced view of discovery to the world at large. So that our professional communications evolve from just the peer-reviewed reports on our findings, aimed at our own scholarly community that must anyway remain our mainstay, but are also geared to spreading knowledge and understanding to all.
Above all, we should not leave this task to a small minority of recognized and gifted communicators, or to the world’s leading experts. It is something that all of us, every graduate student, postdoc, faculty member and even retirees can contribute to.
Whoever wants to join me is making this a reality, just get in touch!
