The nascent state of audiographic criticism parallels the evolving form of the podcast itself. Like Archive 81 and other fictional podcasts that use the conventions of documentary, Record Everything blurs lines between storytelling, criticism, and reportage to determine the nature of a new form. The creators’ description of their “audio first” process identifies a key distinguishing principle of audio criticism: putting sound and text on “equal footing.” The piece achieves its main goal—introducing the PodcastRE database and reflecting on the process of archiving a medium still in its infancy—as it raises broader questions about what it means to record the history of a changing medium while preserving the full experience of a technology in its newness.

As a scholar of the historical experience of new media technologies, I am particularly interested in what this piece can tell us about transitional forms and the lived experience of their consumers. Morris’s account of attempting to “record everything,” set against character Dan’s frustrated attempts to make order from chaos, evocatively captures both the fleeting nature of contemporary digital media and the overwhelming volume of the experience of “Peak Podcast.” As with early radio and television, the timeliness of many podcasts makes them ephemeral. PodcastRE’s goal of “recording everything” preserves something of the texture of daily life for a media consumer in a time of social and technological transition.

As it outlines challenges for the archivist, Record Everything also illuminates the need to preserve a comprehensive body of soundwork. Early experiments in the definition of a media form are often lost before that form is legitimated as an object of study. While scholarly archives generally require an act of curation that is also a valuation, the PodcastRE project preserves a corpus of texts, rather than trying to pre-determine which ones might hold historical significance.

Through its synthesis of documentary, media history, and critique, Record Everything demonstrates both the importance of preserving artifacts of contemporary sound history and the potential of the nascent form of audiographic criticism. A major theme of Archive 81, the podcast from which Record Everything draws material and inspiration, is the difficulty of making order and sense from a disorienting amount of recorded history. Michele Hilmes (2014) identifies a lack of “expressive continuity” between historical and contemporary soundwork, occasioned by the absence of a centralized archive of American radio (Hilmes 2014; see also Bottomley 2015 and Verma 2017). The piece places Archive 81 in a broader historical context, tracing audio drama’s fixation on recording technologies back to the “golden age” of radio. Through this historical comparison, Record Everything demonstrates that thematic emphasis on technology, materiality, and address is characteristic of a medium’s search, in moments of transition, for its own formal and narrative language. With its recordings of the sound of a fleeting digital present, PodcastRE aims to strengthen the tradition of soundwork, managing and preserving the “cycles of stories we tell ourselves” as a culture. 

Works cited

Bottomley, Andrew J. 2015. "Podcasting: A Decade in the Life of a “New” Audio Medium: Introduction." Journal of Radio and Audio Media, 22(2): 164-169.

Hilmes, Michele. 2014. “The Lost Critical History of Radio.” Australian Journalism Review, 36(2), p.11.

Verma, Neil. 2017. “The Arts of Amnesia: The Case for Audio Drama, Part Two.” RadioDoc Review, 3(1), p.6.

Reviewer Bio

Josie Torres Barth received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies in 2019 from McGill University’s Department of English, where she currently teaches courses in film and television studies. Her research examines how forms of audience address in postwar television, film, and radio demonstrate changing conceptions of public and private spheres, and thus anxieties surrounding the ambiguous position of women in the growing consumer economy and U.S. society broadly.