In sixth grade I was tasked with writing my first research paper (I chose Andrew Lloyd Webber as my topic, and quickly discovered that structuring a research paper around a person is easier than structuring a paper around an event, idea, or place). Every sixth grader at my school had this assignment, and two years later we all were assigned slightly longer research papers. I can’t remember what my topic was in eighth grade, which is bothering me. I feel like I remember enough details – eighth grade research paper, Mr. Schneider, 10-12 pages long – to be able to Google it…but the analog search engine for this particular query is a box of papers in my parents’ house in Florida, so I’ll have to wait either until the holidays or until my brain dredges up the memory.
And I could be misremembering – maybe Andrew Lloyd Webber was eighth grade and sixth grade was something or someone completely different. But I remember working on my Andrew Lloyd Webber paper over Thanksgiving break that year, at my Aunt Barb’s house on a farm in Maryland, and in the memory I feel eleven years old, not thirteen.
During the early stages of finding books and other materials to use as sources (but mainly books – digital resources were not particularly widespread. My family didn’t even own a computer yet – if this was sixth grade, that is; in eighth grade, we had one – and in our once-a-week “library” class we’d all watched a movie about the end of the world and five brave students who knew the Dewey Decimal system and thus were able to save themselves and humanity) I began to feel a deep unease about the entire process. It seemed that I was gathering facts from various books and simply repeating them, taking them farther and farther away from any semblance of primary source. It felt like the whole purpose of my research paper was to dilute facts (even though, on a more physical level, I was concentrating them from different sources into a much shorter document). I didn’t have any new information about Cats, or how Andrew Lloyd Webber liked to spend his evenings.
Either none of our teachers or librarians really emphasized how much of our assignment was geared toward teaching us the research process, not anticipating wildly successful final products of scholarship, or they told us and I wasn’t listening or it didn’t register with me. There was nothing new to say, I thought, unless I could research something in person, something that still existed and which I could see or interview myself. And although much of my attitude was due to being young and unable to conceive of research papers as vessels for new perspectives, integrations of information, or arguments, I still feel an element of that unease when I listen to some podcasts.
Some podcasts focus on news and debate, and because the topics of discussion are by definition current and the statements made are opinions, they don’t tend to feel like summaries of information that’s available elsewhere (which is not to say they can’t feel, at times, like a rehash of what everyone’s talking about – but that’s a slightly different issue, I think). Others are more experiential – I’m thinking about Reply All in particular. Part of its appeal lies in how delightful Alex and PJ are, but much of it also comes from the fact that they’re doing field research or working through a technological/sociological mystery – they’re doing journalism, I suppose, where other podcasts are (sometimes) doing reporting.
Podcasts like This Podcast Will Kill You (TPWKY – which, let me note, I thoroughly enjoy) and You’re Wrong About frequently rely on the hosts doing substantial amounts of research (usually reading books and articles on the topic of the pod) and then relaying that research to the listeners. And that’s not a skill to scoff at – it’s time consuming, and the process of synthesizing and then presenting the information in a way that’s both understandable and entertaining isn’t a trivial one (if the hosts of This Podcast Will Kill You weren’t themselves epidemiologists, I’m sure the episodes wouldn’t be nearly as cogent). But there have been several times (on those two podcasts) when I’ve read the material they’re citing from and have thought…I knew all of that from the book (and didn’t necessarily feel like anything was added by the podcast). Granted, most of the audience won’t necessarily have read the book, and if they do so after listening, they’re not likely to be disappointed that some of the same facts appear in the book. But when there’s an additional element like an interview with a Lyme Disease specialist, or a breakdown of a scientific research study, or an interview with someone who was personally involved in whatever event the world at large is “wrong about,” the episode feels completely different – no sense of “here’s what we read and now we’re going to tell you about it.”
I wish I could tell you that I’ve just remembered what I wrote about in eighth grade, but the conclusion to this post isn’t going to be as neat as the conclusion to whatever I was writing about then.
