Although I have once tried and then stopped listening to podcasts some years ago, current discussions and the appearance of more and more podcasts and podcast apps in my RSS feeds and timelines on social networks made me wonder if something has changed in the meantime. Maybe even I have changed and could muster the patience to listen to podcasts nowadays.
So I downloaded two of the current apps on my iPhone and subscribed to a bunch of podcasts. Oh dear, some of them even go on for two hours and new two hour episodes are published each week.
I put my earphones on, plugged them into the iPhone and started the first podcast. As before after 30 minutes or something like that my mind began to wander. I lost track of the podcast. But I told myself “Just take it as a normal talk show on the TV. You don’t follow each and every work on the TV.” and “You might improve your crappy English pronunciation just by listening to podcasts”. OK, especially the last one kept me to it. But I couldn’t listen to the episode in one take. I just fell asleep.
I needed two takes on two evenings to hear through the whole episode. By the time I finished it, the next was already two days old. How would I ever keep up with the pace and how would I even succeed in hearing more than just one podcast regularly?
My podcast apps obediently kept downloading episodes of 5 podcasts I never came around to hearing. So I decided to drop the one two hour per episode podcast and try the others.
In the end I decided that it was no use. Apparently I haven’t changed. I regularly fall asleep when listening to podcasts or I somehow loose track of the podcast I try to listen to. And then it really is different than TV. On TV you actually see the people talking. If the talking is at least somehow interesting that’s enough to keep me focused on the show — at least for longer than half an hour. A podcast cannot keep me focused even if the topic is interesting.
So I’m back to my RSS feeds, which can keep me even more focused than TV as reading is and stays my preferred way of acquiring new knowledge.
Besides, an advantage of anything written is that you can jump forward and over boring sections. You can scan the section headlines and get an understanding of what’s to come that is way superior to the linear nature of podcasts.