Eh, it’s fine. Conversations have their own life.
This Serial talk makes me wonder if having read In Cold Blood would be helpful right now.
I’m pretty much in the same boat as spacetown re: Serial, though I might be a little more underwhelmed with it as an experiment. The show never really struck me as unusual in any regard. It’s essentially a super-long-form This American Life piece. I’ve always been a beat behind in understanding why it became such a big deal. I think it comes down to a lot of overripe mediums being mainstreamed all that the same time. Podcasts, NPR Innocence Stories, and True Crime have been around forever and long since passed maturity. But I guess they weren’t particularly mainstream, and the combination of all of those elements opened people to an addictive entertainment experience. Basically, I think Koenig accidentally invented the Audio Potato Chip, when she set out with some vague notion of this thing called “umami.”
JDoe, I think your conception of the actual show is skewed by its reception by…basically Reddit, as far as I can tell. As spacetown says, from the beginning and throughout the show, Koenig reports the story as ambivalent and the truth as increasingly unknowable. I definitely think the show skews more towards telegraphing the kid’s innocence than his possible guilt—it spends more time on it, makes it more compelling, and owes is essentially based on entertaining that. The weirdest thing for me as a listener is how it danced around the fact that it all came down to a witness testimony. Either the witness was a liar or not. That’s it. I guess she figured without being able to interview him, she didn’t want to lean on that, but we don’t even have a motivation as to why he would lie. So it’s essentially the most elaborate he-said-she-said in audio. Anyway, one of the primary themes of the piece is Koenig going back and forth on her personal thoughts on the case, but I don’t think she did a great job of making the listener feel that tension after building so much “He’s gotta be innocent!” momentum.
The reception to Serial outside of Reddit is, “There’s this new thing called a podcast, and this show Serial is a totally addicting Real Life Mystery!” So I agree with everyone saying that the end result was True Crimish home detective sensationalism. But I disagree with the idea that Koenig did anything to encourage that. I’m not really aware of whatever Twitter account or web presence she might have had, but I don’t think she started any of those hash tags or whatever. Did she participate in them eventually? I dunno. As I said, the actual show is a portrait of ambivalence, which is not a creative way to do a story like this, but is basically the most responsible way to report it within the medium of soft journalism.
As far as inserting yourself into a story, it’s been a thing since, like, the 60’s. I don’t think people even call it New Journalism anymore. Part of the argument supporting New Journalism is that “objective” journalism is so subjective that it’s more honest and responsible to incorporate the means of media production into the work and implicitly acknowledge the work’s inherent subjectivity. I mean, if you’re just saying you prefer “objective” over “subjective” then fine. But I disagree that journalism ought to be one or the other or that moderator-less journalism is more “mature.” That word choice seems pretty ideological.
So yeah: I’m in the “Serial didn’t bother me, but the fandom caught me by surprise; and the Jr. Detective aspect of it was was troubling.” Should be noted that Reddit Jr. Detectives spring into action unbidden all the time, though. Nobody asked the public their opinion on the Boston Marathon bombing. The internet empowers the idiocy on a new scale.