Dances With Bears » DANCES WITH BEARS OR PODCASTS WITH BEARS

DANCES WITH BEARS OR PODCASTS WITH BEARS – THE LONG READ VERSUS THE LONG TALK

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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

When you sit down to read, watch, or listen to website, blog, Twitter, or podcast on the war against Russia, do you combine it with a glass of your favourite alcohol – or is that what you’d like but it’s forbidden on your jogging track, car, bus, or train commute?

The answer for you now is Raymond Chandler’s best line from The Long Goodbye (1953): “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

Chandler’s other best lines for now are: “we make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk” – this is how to think about President Donald Trump’s MAGA peacemaking. “If you believe in an idea, you don’t own you, it owns you” – that’s the Marxist-Leninist reality that a generation of Russians were educated to forget from 1991 and are having to re-learn today. And “nothing says goodbye like a bullet” – that’s what President Vladimir Putin meant when he told reporters the other day in Beijing: “if common sense ultimately prevails, an acceptable option for ending this conflict can be agreed upon…We will see how it goes from here. If not, we will have to achieve the tasks set before us by military means.”

According to the most recent surveys of the American podcast audience, more than half listen as a combination of entertainment, lesson, and diversion at the same time – to have something to do when they are doing something else. That’s the big podcast difference from long-read media – you can read Dances with Bears and drink beer or wine, but you can’t take off your own or someone else’s clothes at the same time. Only about one in ten US listeners to podcasts do it in the old-fashioned way of desktop or laptop read.

There’s a hitch, though. Packaging information in podcast form may lead to less short-term comprehension and less long-term memory retention than occurs in reading. To date, there is research concluding this is true; and also research that it’s false.

There also appear to be national, ethnic and racial differences between blog readers and podcast listeners. While more and more of the global audience is opting for the podcast to replace the website, blog and tweet stream, and spending increasing amounts of time on podcasts at the expense of time reading print, in the US, the podcast option is preferred by more blacks, Hispanics and Asians than whites.

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, whichever age, ethnic or gender group you belong to, and however you prefer to think, Dances with Bears has come up with a solution for you: this is to make podcasts with different geographical coordinates, and follow them up with long-read backgrounders on the Dances with Bears website.

There are now four podcasts for you to tune into.

Once a week on Tuesdays – Dialogue Works with Nima Alkhorshid: