The Podcast Experience: Reflecting on New Media and Community

This study explores how traditional college age students interact with podcasts, both as consumers and as producers. This research was guided by two theoretical areas, the anthropology of new media and concepts of community, paired with an examination of podcast history and podcasts studies. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews of college age students in Atlanta, Georgia, I discuss college students’ schemata for categorizing and classifying podcasts amidst a profusion of types and platforms for digital media, their quotidian practices around podcasts, and their motivations for listening to and for creating them. The result of this study is a ground-up understanding of the place of podcasts in the lives of first-generation “digital natives” within the proliferating and rapidly shifting mediascape of late modernity.