Podcast Rhetorics: Insights into Podcasts as Public Persuasion

Abstract

Asserting that professional podcasts serve as an important platform for arguments regarding issues of public importance, Podcast Rhetorics advances rhetoric and writing studies scholarship by moving beyond the dominant focus on the medium’s utility for multimodal composition pedagogy to address podcasting’s rhetorical dimensions outside the classroom. Seeking an overarching theory of podcasts as public persuasion, I identify technology, sound, and conversation as the medium’s central rhetorical components. Drawing on philosophy of technology, rhetorical sound studies, and theories of demagoguery and circulation, I analyze these elements as they function in a variety of popular podcasting platforms, shows, and episodes, including content that grapples with the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic. In shaping how podcasts are regulated, recorded, produced, delivered, received, organized, promoted, played, discussed, and monetized, technology, I argue, may be unmatched as a prevailing rhetorical force on the medium. Listening multimodally for both affect and argument, I find sound contributes structure as well evidence, builds persuasive immersion, and guides a listener’s relationship to rhetorical content in highly produced podcasts, potentially impacting audiences’ points of view on public issues. As with other elements of podcast rhetoric, conversation can both support and undermine democracy—deliberative-style conversation foregrounds complexity, while demagogic conversation flattens complex public issues into simplistic narratives of right and wrong that appeal to audiences’ preexisting beliefs.