Here we go again, this time with audio
Having just joined the iPod world with my new video-capable toy, I decided (all on my own initative!) to check out this “podcasting” (and the nascent “vodcasting”) to see what all the hype was about.
Well, there’s a whole lot of crap out there, just like everywhere else, but there are some really fun ones. I enjoy the music enthusiasts who drag old stuff out of the vault, dorktones being my current favorite. Then there are all the tech tidbits, funny stuff, treatises on the digital divide, news about outer space, documentary footage of life in Tuscany… lots of fun and educational things to waste time on the subway with.
Today I read this article in Wired online about how there are no women in podcasting. Although the piece starts off by citing an incident of sexist rudeness at a podcasting event, the tone subtly changes to shift the blame onto the women. Women just aren’t doing anything interesting. The only successful female-authored podcast is one about yuppie childrearing. Women aren’t interested in technology, and have to be dragged into it by their husbands. Women just aren’t making themselves heard.
Bullshit. This is no different from my visit to the National Museum of Women in the Arts here in DC, which features lots of interesting artwork from women whose husbands were famous artists. Don’t tell me that women just weren’t interested in making art. And of course there is the recurring lament of “where are all the women bloggers?” The female podcasters can’t be found because nobody in the boys club is looking for them. Nobody told them there was a convention. Journalists only give press time to the “most popular” podcasters, according to…. the male network of podcasters. Yawn. Same ol’ same ol’.
Wired Magazine kind of pisses me off anyway. It’s written in the same sort of pandering illiterate boy-speak that one finds in Maxim or Stuff and the graphics look like a flyer for an extreeeeeme whatever-boarding contest. A while back there was an issue devoted to the theme of “remix culture”, which could have been interesting, except that it was full of short pointless articles about tired and shallow mashups of various tropes. One article was about messing with famous logos for ironic fun - it featured a t-shirt with the Sex Pistols logo, except it had been changed to “Pistol Sex” and had a gagged and blindfolded woman and a bunch of guns floating around it. There was no caption explaining that one. It’s the kind of thing that could be provocative if painted in large scale and hung on a gallery wall with other logos made violent. But in the context of the article, it was clearly meant to be wearable and funny. Har har har! Pistol sex! I get it!