With great power comes great responsibility!
We each enter podcasting because we have something to say. Or we want to learn something or we’re just really excited by something. This is the essence of any creative endeavour. It is the same reason everyone piled into blogging back in the day and to a lesser extent Youtube.
We try to bring together, both within our ecosystems and the entire web, as many like minded people as possible. The danger in that is we become echo chambers. Preaching to to the converted and blind to all other explanations of the world. This is what the western democracies are facing now. These echo chambers led to partisanship.
As podcasters, bloggers, Youtubers and creative types in general, we need to keep open minds, to find that which contradicts our understandings of the world. By doing this we make our part of the world a little bit stronger and little bit more tolerant.
By coupling our blog and our podcast together we find the space to reach people across the planet whom we would never have anything to do with in the course of ordinary events. By harnessing our passions, by reaching out to and embracing those with contrary views to our own, by providing both written and audio content that explores the limits and beyond of our niches, we make the world a better place. To do otherwise is to make the world a bitter place.
The written word has triumphed so long that the power of the voice, the person speaking directly to us has been subsumed. Not since the days of Cuchulain in the West and the shaman like figures of the rest of the world has the spoken voice held such power. It speaks to us through a different neural pathway from the written and the visual. It can act as the “voice” of common sense (pun intended).
Let’s all make certain, when we hit the record button we are doing so to make the world a better place. A place that has been changed because of the words we uttered into the ears of our loyal listeners.