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PODCASTING AND PERSONAL BRANDS:
MAPPING A THEORETICAL PATH FROM
PARTICIPATORY EMPOWERMENT TO
INDIVIDUAL PERSONA CONSTRUCTION
TIMOTHY YEE
ABSTRACT
This research paper critically analyses The Osher Günsberg Podcast to
illustrate a theoretical disconnect between early participatory media theories and
the contemporary practice of using the podcast to construct a networked branded
persona. I trace the history of early theorisations of the medium, first regarded by
leading scholars as a tool for user empowerment in the ‘participatory turn’ in media
studies before examining how it is employed by conventional media personalities to
establish transmedia personal brands; a particular phenomenon emerging at the
forefront of a renewed interest in podcasting by traditional media stakeholders. I
argue that this disconnect reveals a need for scholars who study the podcast to now
draw on the emerging field of persona studies, which offers a range of new tools that
will be useful in analysing the continued evolution of podcasting under its new
market pressures and potentials.
KEY WORDS
Podcasting; Participatory Media; Personal Brands
INTRODUCTION – ESTABLISHED PLAYERS ENTERING A NEW MARKET
In August, 2016, I attended the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s OzPod 2016, Australia’s
very first media industry conference exclusively dedicated to podcasting. The event explored
“everything from audience acquisition and retention, approaches to measurement, new
technologies, the rise of the podcast in traditional media, revenue opportunities and the art of
storytelling” (ABC 2016a) through a program of panel discussions and keynote presentations.
This was an ambitious agenda for a one-day conference, but that so much was crammed into
such a short period of time reflected the fact that podcasting had been paid far less attention
than other new media formats such as blogging, social media or online video streaming.
Following in the wake of a rapid growth in podcasting worldwide, this business-focused
schedule seemed understandable. The underlying implication was that there is much work to be
done if podcasting was going to be taken seriously by the media industry, its advertisers and
broader Australian audiences.
Globally, the Apple Podcast app served up over 10 billion streaming plays in 2016 across
155 countries, up from 8 billion in 2014. According to the company’s Podcast Business Manager
James O. Boggs, podcasting has three established business models: “ads and sponsorship,
community support/donation and upsell,” each which are key for creative and financial success
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(Boggs 2017). Third-party research commissioned by a group of prominent podcasting
businesses including Gimlet Media and Midroll Media suggests that the “podcasting industry” is
now on track to generate more than $659 million in annual revenue by 2020 in the USA alone
(Price Waterhouse Coopers 2018). In Australia, initial research for OzPod 2016 showed there
had been a 14 per cent net increase in podcast listening year on year, with 36 per cent of people
listening to a greater variety of podcasts compared to the year before (ABC 2016b).
All of this development and excitement around the podcast hints at the fact that it is no
longer adequate to consider the media format as just remediated radio or questionable-quality
audio produced by amateurs existing in non-commercial environments (McHugh 2016, p. 70-
77). Instead, podcasting is undergoing a maturing process that requires media scholars to more
closely examine the podcast and its nuanced developing cultures.
This research paper specifically investigates the way that Australian media personalities
use podcasting to add a sense of intimacy to their already-established personal brands, as a
particular phenomenon emerging at the forefront of this new interest in podcasting as a serious
media channel. To do this I offer a brief history of early theorisations of podcasting, first
regarded by leading scholars as a tool for user empowerment in the ‘participatory turn’ (Jenkins
2014, p. 271) in media studies. This is followed by an examination of how the involvement of
traditional media brands such as This American Life have altered the podcasting landscape,
pushing professionally produced shows such as Serial into the cultural mainstream. A critical
analysis of popular Australian podcast, The Osher Günsberg Podcast, proceeds to illustrate how
traditional media personalities are using the format to construct nuanced transmedia personal
brands that straddle both participatory and commercial environments through the medium’s
intimate affordances. I draw on the emerging field of persona studies to describe the nuances of
this phenomenon which are not widely accounted for in existing podcast studies literature. In
doing so it is argued that media scholars studying the podcast must move beyond popular ideas
of collective user empowerment and draw on the range of new theories and tools that place
persona construction at the centre of participatory media studies and practices.
METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
To conduct this research, I have performed a close critical reading of a high profile Australian
podcast, The Osher Günsberg Podcast. I created an archive of approximately eight hours of audio
content with the selection of episodes I studied all published in the Apple Podcasts App within
the previous 24 months at the time of listening. By performing a close critical reading I have
been able to interpret these podcast episodes as cultural artefacts using a range of theories from
discourses including participatory media studies, affect theory and persona studies to better
understand how participatory media cultures are evolving. As McKee explains, “We interpret
texts (films, television programmes, magazines, advertisements, clothes, graffiti, and so on) in
order to try and obtain a sense of the ways in which, in particular cultures at particular times,
people make sense of the world around them” (McKee 2003, p. 1).
I listened to each podcast episode in line with Glaser and Straus’ inductive grounded
theory approach, that is, an intensive rather than extensive research approach (Harré 1979, p.
137) concerned with processes instead of patterns (Sayer 1992, p. 242-244 cited in
Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010, p. 15). Additionally, “Glaser and Straus (1967) argued that
theories developed using their model will be understandable by practitioners, and will ‘work’ in
real world settings” (Oktay 2012, p. 5).
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Grassroots Beginnings: a brief history of podcasting and its potentials
On February 12, 2004, The Guardian published an article titled ‘Audible revolution’ written by
Ben Hammersley, a British journalist, internet technologist, blogger and broadcaster.
Hammersley claimed that the increasing flow of communication between journalists and their
readers, the decentralisation of networked distribution and the emergence of new business
models for the online marketplace were leading the media landscape to a “boom in amateur
radio”. This exciting medium was so new at the time that Hammersely didn’t even have the
adequate terminology to categorise what he was reporting at the intersection of iPods, cheap
audio software and the rise of weblogs. “But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting?
GuerillaMedia?” he wrote (Hammersley 2004).
Across broader networked environments other groundbreaking new media experiences
were transpiring. That same year, Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook available to students at
Harvard University; in 2005, the video sharing platform YouTube was founded; in
2006, TIME magazine proclaimed “You” the person of the year; and in 2007, Apple launched the
first ever iPhone. Just one month after Hammersley first used the term “podcasting” (Berry
2006, p. 143, Madsen 2009, p. 1192), Henry Jenkins published an article in The International
Journal of Cultural Studies that attempted to map such shifts in the media into “a theory of media
convergence that allows us to identify major sites of tension and transition shaping the media
environment for the coming decade” (Jenkins 2004, p.33). Clearly, both media practice and
media theory were undergoing a period of incredible change. Moreover, it appeared that the
podcast was an important component of this movement, embodying a sense of empowerment
experienced by new media users.
Early theorisations of podcasting comfortably placed the medium within what Jenkins
had previously referred to as ‘participatory culture’. These are cultures in which individuals feel
encouraged to express and share ideas, where knowledge is transferred from experienced
members to new members, contributions are seen to matter, social relationships are
meaningful, and most individuals are able to participate due to low barriers of entry (Jenkins et
al. 2009). In Jenkins’ ethnography of Star Trek fans, he adapted de Certeau’s (1984) concepts of
‘poaching’ and ‘tactics’ to demonstrate how television fans could be understood to be active and
empowered agents who made meaning through mediated communities and derivative work
they were creating as ‘Trekkers’ (Jenkins, 1992). This work called on traditional media
organisations to reconsider the idea that “all participation in the consumer economy constitutes
cooptation” (Jenkins 2004, p. 36). Recasting fans as participants in the development of a media
franchise instead of simply consumers set the groundwork for his theories on participation in a
convergent media environment. He canvassed his perspectives in his article ‘The cultural logic
of media convergence’ (2004), and then expanded these theories in Convergence Culture: where
old and new media collide (2006a) and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: exploring participatory
culture (2006b). A key pillar of this effort to extend the conclusions in Textual Poachers (Jenkins
1992) was the work of Pierre Lévy (1997), which provided an explanation of how empowering
practices of participatory fandom could evolve alongside networked technologies.
Lévy’s idea of ‘collective intelligence’ articulated Jenkins’ theory that media fans were
increasingly empowered by the rise of digital networks and as a result were able to access
knowledge and power that far exceeded their own individual limitations. Speaking
on Lévy’s concept Jenkins says, “And this organization of audiences into what Lévy calls
knowledge communities allows them to exert a greater aggregate power in their negotiations
with media producers” (Jenkins 2006a, p. 27).
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This signaled a ‘participatory turn’ in media studies (Jenkins 2014, p. 271)
which asserted that a new conceptualisation of the media consumer as participant occurred at
the intersection of new technologies that enabled consumers to remix and recontextualise
content, expanding cultures of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media production and economic trends that
encouraged the flow of information across different platforms (Jenkins, 2006b, p. 135-136). This
thinking expanded the concepts of the ‘prosumer’ (Toffler, 1980) and the ‘pro-am’ (Leadbeater
and Miller 2004), themselves more recently contemporised by Axel Bruns’ idea of the ‘produser’
(Bruns 2008). Such cultures were open to willing contributors, which disrupted the established
dichotomy between artist and audience, producer and consumer (Jenkins 2006a).
According to Richard Berry, podcasting is an example of this way of conceiving media
producers and consumers. Berry states, “What podcasting offers is a classic ‘horizontal’ media
form: producers are consumers and consumers become producers and engage in conversations
with each other” (Berry 2006, p. 146). The medium was identified as an early expression of DIY
media in the digital era that allowed individuals to leverage the network to communicate with
each other (Meserko 2015a, p. 798) and establish important new social connections (McClung
and Johnson 2010, p. 85).
The podcast’s nascent popularity was spurred on by a rising culture of ‘music for free’
which emerged from the prevalence of peer-to-peer sharing platforms and the ascent of the
Apple iPod (Menduni 2007, p. 9). At the time, the iPod was redefining how listeners ‘inhabited’
the spaces they moved through in the everyday, creating “privatised audio bubbles” in which
they could control “thoughts, feelings and observations as they manage both space and time”
(Bull 2006, p. 344). The device’s technological ability to port a vast library of audio files far
exceeded what was possible with precursory personal music players such as the Sony Walkman
and Discman, which relied on hardware. Through its integration with the iTunes software, the
iPod enabled its owners to travel with a near limitless number of voices, songs and ideas, ready
to be played at the click of a button. Through this non-linear listening capability, podcasting
contributed to a new form of freedom in which audiences could time-shift their listening and
avoid the same homogenous programming and saturated advertising found on traditional radio.
It celebrated the new possibilities of fragmented media consumption (Crofts et al. 2005), aided
by the medium’s incorporation into the iTunes software in 2005 and later the introduction of a
standalone Apple ‘Podcasts’ iPhone app in 2015 (Morris and Patterson 2015, p. 223).
But beyond illustrating new models of networked and mobile communication,
podcasting was a tool of empowerment that placed the capabilities of media production into the
hands of the non-professional audio producer. It enabled a type of “de-professionalised” (Luders
2008 cited in Bottomley 2015, p. 181) world-building that helped producers and consumers
make sense of the hyper-mediated environments that increasingly surrounded them
(MacDougall 2011, p. 718). For the first time, networked audiences could seamlessly listen to
unconventional perspectives brought into public forums by the audio recordings of amateur
content creators. Virginia Madsen draws attention to The Dawn and Drew Show! as an example
of how early podcasting enabled audiences to connect with niche voices (Madsen 2009, p.
1196).
In 2004 Dawn Micelo and Drew Domkis started recording a podcast about “two ex-
gutter punks who fall in love, buy a retired farm in Wisconsin (then move to Costa Rica and
back) and tell the world their dirty secrets” (Micelo and Domkis 2017). At the time, the hosts
were reflective of a new wave of alternative voices in the networked media landscape that did
not rely on endorsement from traditional gatekeepers. Micelo commented on the success of
their homegrown, self-produced amateur show in their 100th episode saying, “Who’d have
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thought anyone would listen?” “Take this, Big Brother! I don’t need you. I don’t need your
fucking contracts. I’ve got my own radio show!” (Micelo as cited in Madsen 2009, p. 1196).
Madsen says this is expressive of the early excitement that accompanied amateur podcasting
and its ability to challenge traditional media and communication channels (Ibid).
What the podcast provided for Dawn and Drew and a raft of other early non-media-
professionals such as Dan Klass of The Bitterest Pill and Mignon Fogarty of Grammar Girl, was
agency to independently connect with audiences. This kind of grassroots broadcasting posed a
challenge for traditional media companies such as public broadcasters, which had long
“promoted themselves as gatekeepers of quality content and journalistic integrity among the
free-for-all babble of the internet” (Murray 2009, p. 199). Established media companies risked
“brand dilution” as they navigated the bourgeoning days of the medium and its “interactive and
participatory characteristics” (Ibid.) The DIY, user-generated podcast embodied the optimism
and the potentials of participatory cultures in the early days of the web to redefine the media
landscape beyond the influence of traditional media corporations.
THE PODCAST’S SECOND COMING: ATTENTION FROM BIG BRANDS AND BIG
PERSONALITIES
Despite the idealistic rhetoric of user empowerment marked by the participatory turn,
columnist Kevin Roose wrote in New York Magazine that sometime in 2009 or 2010, the hype
surrounding the early days of podcasting seemed to wither. Roose attributes a lack of content
innovation as well as the rise of online music and video streaming as potential detractors, and
claimed that only podcasting stalwarts such as This American Life and Radiolab (two remediated
broadcast radio shows) remained prevalent in Apple’s podcasting top charts. “Download
numbers fell. Interest waned,” he reported (Roose 2014). Yet just five years later in 2014 an
entirely different problem had emerged – “There [were] too many great podcasts to keep up
with” (Ibid., emphasis in original text). Independent podcasting networks such as Radiotopia
had formed, podcasting production companies such as Pineapple Street Media were founded,
and a number of ad buying companies such as Midroll Media were making ground in monetising
content at scale. Consumers and producers alike heralded in a renewed podcasting boom. Roose
speculated that an increase in audience awareness, higher quality production values, and the
integration of smart phones into new cars were three significant factors contributing to this
podcasting renaissance.
Richard Berry identifies the podcast Serial as a landmark that encapsulates this second
coming. Serial’s first season was released in 2014 and followed the 1999 true crime murder
story of high-school student Hae Min Lee. Each week a new episode was delivered by RSS feed
to subscribers as per the standard protocol for podcast distribution. However, unlike any other
podcast that came before it, Serial achieved record-breaking success. It became the fastest
podcast to reach five million downloads (Dredge 2014), it was still being downloaded 500,000
times per day months after its initial release (Kohjer 2015 cited in Berry 2015, p. 171), and it
was the first podcast to attract an off-season ad campaign (Blattberg 2015), meaning that
marketers were willing to pay to retro fit their advertisements into the show to capitalise on
any downloads thereafter. It also spawned a number of podcasts about the show, a practice not
common at the time (Ibid.).
In addition to the technological convergences Roose wrote of, Berry attributes Serial’s
success to its association with the “well-known, much loved and highly respected brand” This
American Life (TAL). He unpacks how a new media brand forged by a traditional broadcast
powerhouse gained traction in an environment that was originally celebrated by scholars and
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amateurs for its ability to subvert such media hierarchies. Berry notes that Serial was a spin-off
of TAL with co-producer and host Sarah Koenig having worked on the former radio show for a
number of years before starting her own podcast; TAL’s anchor host Ira Glass is himself a well-
regarded and highly visible media personality, who also appeared on popular television show
The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to promote Serial, including airing an instructional video
telling viewers how to listen to Serial; and Glass also presented a preview of Serial via the TAL
RSS feed (Berry, 2015).
Through all of this promotion, a Serial trailer had already reached the top spot on the
Apple Podcast charts before the first episode’s release. Furthermore, Berry’s research
discovered that more than half of survey respondents said that they were listeners of TAL
before they listened to Serial (Berry 2015, p. 174). It was a show that was entering a market that
had been primed by the success of highly produced independent shows such as 99% Invisible
(Ibid.), but it had the cultural clout and marketing channels of one of American public radio’s
biggest entities. In other words, the podcast’s renaissance and its entry into the pop-cultural
zeitgeist wasn’t only caused by the participatory potentials of new media exemplified by the
efforts of amateur content creators such as Dawn and Drew, but also due to the profile of
professional media brands such as This American Life.
The role that traditional media brands have played in the rise of podcasting is an
important consideration for scholars studying how media participants use the podcast in the
contemporary moment. Since 2014 many traditional media personalities have created their
own podcasts, banking on their traditional media celebrity status similar to the way Serial
leveraged the brand capital of TAL. In Australia, a selection of recognisable media stars from
radio, television and print media have started their own independent podcasts. For example, the
ABC’s Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb host Chat 10 Looks 3, a show offering insights into their
lives as television hosts, journalists, mothers and friends; Triple J radio alumnus Tom Ballard
hosts Like I’m a Six-Year-Old, an interview show featuring young political and social activists;
former Cosmopolitan editor and founder of the Mamamia Women’s Network Mia Freedman
hosts a talk show called No Filter; and standup comedian Wil Anderson produces, hosts and co-
hosts a variety of shows about philosophy, sport and pop culture.
The turn to personal broadcasting by these media personalities reflects a shift in the
rhetorical dimensions of podcasting; it’s no longer exclusively the side hobby of DIY pundits, sci-
fi fans or bedroom producers. It’s now an important content channel for serious players in the
Australian media landscape. To illustrate the emerging dynamic between this new culture of
podcasting and traditional media brands I have performed a close critical reading of one of
Australia’s most popular shows, The Osher Günsberg Podcast (TOGP). Observing how well-
known media personalities use podcasting to reveal intimate aspects of themselves places the
medium within the context of the contemporary practice of transmedia personal branding.
Participating to construct an intimate personal brand: Reading The Osher
Günsberg Podcast
Despite a successful career in commercial Australian media that has spanned more than a
decade and canvased stints in radio, television and live performance, Osher Günsberg hosts an
independent podcast self-described in the Apple Podcasts app as “A weekly conversation with
someone remarkable that will leave you truly inspired.” By some measures, it is an Australian
podcasting success story that celebrates what is possible when individuals invest in
participatory media formats. It has an international audience of listeners (as comments in Apple
iTunes reveal), over 800 mostly favourable reviews on the Apple Podcasts app, is, at the time of
writing, ranked 17th in the corresponding comedy top charts, has a 5-star Apple listener rating,
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and boasts an archive of more than 170 past episodes recorded over more than four years.
Günsberg states he produces the podcast in his spare room using off-the-shelf consumer
technology (Please support the podcast x 2016) allowing him to deliver content with ease (Tulley
2011, p. 268), free from the limitations of traditional radio (Fauteux 2015, p. 203). Günsberg
alludes to his ability to connect with audiences and build an online community premised on
developing a meaningful relationship with his listeners saying, “This show makes my week and I
know from the emails that I get every single week that a lot of people enjoy it” (Please support
the podcast x 2016).
Günsberg’s podcast is notably different to his show business work elsewhere where he
is known for hosting popular reality television shows such as Australian Idol, The Bachelor,
Bondi Rescue and So You Think You Can Dance (US). On TV screens his personality is confined by
well-worn formats of novelty challenges, confession cams and contestant eliminations. The
podcast, however, holds potentials in its intimate medium affordances which make it more
conventional to talk about more personal anecdotes, perhaps unexpected of a high-profile
media personality.
In this way TOGP can be immediately seen to operate within the transmedia personal
brand of Osher Günsberg. This personal brand also consists of his roles as the host of prime-
time television shows and as co-host of the Stav, Abby & Osher show on Hit105 Brisbane.
In Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide (2006a), Jenkins outlines this kind of
matrix with the concept of transmedia storytelling as a marketing strategy for brands. It is a
storytelling technique that stems from the Japanese marketing strategy known as ‘media mix’
and refers to “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across
multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment
experience” (Jenkins 2007). He confirms the potential of transmedia brands saying, “close
collaboration between program producers, brand gurus, and new media companies suggests
rapid growth of industry interest in transmedia entertainment over just a few short years”
(Jenkins 2006a, p. 125).
Though Jenkins is referring to massive fiction story world franchises such as The Matrix,
elements of this framework appear prevalent in Günsberg’s media participation, too. As a
podcast host, television presenter and radio personality Günsberg is at an epicentre of
Australia’s creative industries and exposed to those same producers, brand marketers and
media companies that converge in transmedia storytelling. Comparably, where Jenkins says
transmedia stories reveal different dimensions across different channels, Günsberg is revealing
different parts of his personality across different discourses. The outcome of participating in
both commercial and self-produced media in this fashion is increased listener self-brand
connection, which generates social and commercial authority (Granitz and Forman, 2015: 44).
The crosspollination of the personal and professional is clear in a podcast episode where
Günsberg asks listeners to tune-in to the 2016 season premiere of The Bachelor, which is “less
than 72 hours away” (Ep 143: Socratis Otto 2016). He calls on his podcast listeners to watch
because the TV show’s stakeholders are “looking for a big opening,” referring presumably to
high numbers in audience viewership and ratings.
The outcome of Günsberg positioning himself as an accessible yet layered media
personality is what Jenkins refers to as transmedia engagement (Jenkins, Ford & Green 2013, p.
132). Transmedia engagement is concerned with prolonging interactions between media
participant and media stimulus for a deeper, richer experience, (Ibid., p. 137). In the case of
Osher Günsberg, audiences can discover the dynamics of his personal brand on their morning
commute via his radio show, during their lunch break via the television and in bed before going
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to sleep via his podcast. The result is a nuanced personal brand that feels familiar to large
populations across multiple settings, increasing the personality’s exposure, status and social
capital. It is a formula that works because the host benefits from having an existing audience.
Within this matrix of media formats, the podcast operates as a contrast to other mediums,
giving listeners a behind-the-scenes and seemingly intimate look into the host’s personal life.
Meserko explains that positioning oneself between traditional and new media
broadcasting technology is a strategic response to the increasing preoccupation that audiences
have with ‘technologies of self-fashioning,’ (Johnson 2008, p. 32 in Meserko 2014, p. 458). These
podcasts are examples of “overt commitment to self-improvement and self-fashioning […] Such
podcasts are lessening the distance between celebrities and their fans through discourses of
therapy, self-improvement, and intense indulgences of feeling” (Ibid., p. 458). This can become
an important routine practice for both podcaster and audience as Kris Markman notes that
interpersonal connections are one of the main motivators for podcasters to continue
podcasting. Markman says, “Listener emails, submissions, discussion fora, and phone calls (via
voicemail playback) were used regularly, and the feedback podcasters received from these
channels helped sustain their interest” (Markman 2011, p. 557). That is, the more of their
personal life a podcaster is seen to reveal to their audience, the stronger that bond can become,
and therefore, the more resonant the overarching transmedia persona may be.
This is a common conceit in the podcasting landscape as Meserko’s research on the
immensely successful US comedy podcast WTF with Marc Maron reveals. Meserko investigates
how WTF’s perceived authenticity – of its host comedian Marc Maron and his guests (having
previously included former US President Barack Obama) – has contributed to the show’s
success. Meserko claims, “There is a perception that Maron’s podcast allows him a space to be
more real and reveal a more ‘authentic’ version of himself” (Meserko 2015b, p. 797). He adds
that the podcast’s affordances enable first-person accounts to explain away controversy,
participate in communal reflection and provide a more authentic presentation of oneself (Ibid.,
p. 808). Furthermore, consider the closeness of the human voice as it penetrates a listener’s
private sound-world (Madsen and Potts 2010, p. 43), the mobility of human connection made
possible by devices such as the iPhone (Crawford 2012, p. 214) and the practice of ‘background
listening’ that is “critical to the sense of intimacy generated in these spaces; ongoing contact
with the minutiae of a person’s life” (Crawford 2009 cited in Crawford 2012, p. 68).
Siobhan McHugh notes that audio media can impact its creators and listeners in intense
ways that draw on the ‘affective power of sound’ (McHugh 2012). McHugh locates the power of
affect in audio in the emotional tenderness portrayed by the human voice. In a study on radio
documentaries, she noted that “when an informant narrates an experience in an affecting way
(i.e., with palpable emotion), listeners will register the emotion through the prism of their own
lived experiences; we can infer that this personalization will confer added impact” (McHugh
2012, p. 195). The human voice can be used to emote empathy in listeners and place them in an
intimate mediated relationship with the storyteller. For the podcast, the ‘inbetween-ness’ of
affect (Gregg & Seigworth 2010, p. 1) is constructed not just in moments of “affective auditory
elements such as ambient sound and music” (McHugh 2012 p. 198), but also through additional
medium affordances.
In their analyses of the Love + Radio and The Heart podcasts, Spinelli and Dann (2019)
argue that the use of earbuds to listen to podcasts re-embody the networked voice when placed
in contact with the listener, literally inside the body in most cases. While historically scholars
have considered earbuds as tools to keep noise out by creating private sound bubbles, this
emphasis highlights what they let in. Earbuds “allow for hyper-intimacy” that channel another
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human’s voice directly into your mental space, “present inside you” (Spinelli & Dann 2019 p.
84). In their fieldwork the researchers found that podcast hosts were sometimes aware of this
physicality, and considered how tone, granularity and microphone proximity may be delivered
within this context. They further suggest that this format intimacy – the “native podcasting
approach” (Ibid. p. 87) – allows for podcasters to put various storytelling techniques to work in
order to create empathy between podcast host, subject and listener. “[P]roducers brought about
empathy very often through identity formation narratives, through a human seeking for
belonging or searches for relationships that deliver a meaning or insight” (Ibid. p. 87).
Günsberg can be seen employing these native podcasting self-help narrative tropes in
episode 143 when discussing his mental health:
I hope your week was good, I had some tough days this week. I’m not going to lie.
It was difficult for a couple of days there. Yep, it was tough. It was tough on
[Günsberg’s fiancé] because she was worried about what was happening with me
and I just had to explain: this is all it is, it’s just a thing that plays in my brain. It’s
nowhere near as bad as it used to be thanks to the new meds, which are nice. But
it’s still there and it’s always going to be there and I just have to get better and
better at learning how to rationalise it and figure it all out. So, yeah, I did have
some tough days this week… (Ep 143: Socratis Otto 2016)
Delivered physically via earbuds, in a tempered tone and without any novel sound track or
effects, this snippet reflects the intense intimacy channeled into the medium. Through his
podcast, Günsberg leverages these affordances, simultaneously contrasting and complementing
his involvement in traditional media franchises, to champion a personal brand, premised on
broadcasting ‘real conversations between real people’. This ‘realness’ may or may not be
performed, but it doesn’t mean it is not perceived as authentic. While in other participatory
media cultures, such as MP3 blogging, authenticity is perceived in part by distance from
commercialisation (Borschke 2014), the podcast’s native affordances and DIY history seem to
assist even those from highly commercialised backgrounds in a kind of redemption; an
opportunity to ‘truly be themselves’ despite whatever association with programming on
corporate media networks they may have. This kind of affective, open, tell-all content is an
example of the show’s tagline in action: “Authenticity is the new black. Come and join us.”
The phenomenon of traditional media personalities turning to the podcast to add depth
and nuance to their existing personal brands through mediated authenticity and intimacy
requires an advancing of the podcasting literature canon. While early participatory media
theories from Jenkins et al. are useful to make sense of podcasting at the turn of the millennium,
this study of The Osher Günsberg Podcast demonstrates its inadequacies in describing more
contemporary trends. What the emergence of transmedia brands in this space tells media
scholars is that – alongside building collective intelligence and creating grassroots fan
communities – the construction of multifaceted persona is now a central tenet of participatory
media cultures. For this, researchers studying podcasting may benefit from turning to the
emerging field of persona studies.
POTENTIALS IN PERSONA STUDIES
In David Marshall’s work on persona he builds on early theorisations of the concept in
psychoanalysis and philosophy, following on from the work of key scholars such as Jung,
Goffman, Butler and Foucault (Barbour, Marshall & Moore 2014, p. 2). Marshall describes
persona as the strategic construction of forms of public identity and states that the concept is
“not about the real ‘self’, but it [has] indices that link the individual to the persona” (Marshall
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2016, p. 1). Key to persona studies is exploring the construction of persona through
participatory media use. Marshall proposes that creating a public persona is a task that is now
increasingly common for greater and greater parts of the population (Marshall 2014, p. 154).
Marshall has also identified the movement from a primarily representational media
environment to a primarily presentational media environment (Marshall [1997] 2014, p. xxxii-
xxxvi cited in Marshall 2015, p. 126). Representational media consists of “books, newspapers,
magazines, film, radio and television” and has been considered dominant over the past two
centuries. They are representational in that through “stories, narratives, and images, these
media forms attempt to embody a populace” and represent a culture (Marshall 2014, p. 160).
Presentational media, by contrast, is media that is “performed, produced and exhibited by the
individual” outside of the representational media structure (Ibid.). As participatory media
technologies become more and more a part of everyday life, so too does the act of constructing
personas (Marshall 2015, p. 124).
Clearly, scholars in both participatory media studies and persona studies are concerned
with the acts of cultural production occurring at the hands of participatory media users
(Barbour, Marshall & Moore 2014; Marshall 2015; Marshall and Barbour 2015; Marshall 2016).
However, the Persona Studies perspective is interested in the idea that these acts of production
involve constructing networked identities, each akin to wearing a different kind of mask.
Studying participation through the lens of persona is to acknowledge that identity construction
is part of participation in networked environments and vice versa. Barbour et al. cite Hannah
Arendt’s reading of persona in ancient Greece to note that “this mask of public identity was not
seen in a derogatory way; rather it was natural to assume a public/political persona that was
quite removed from the private and home sphere” (Arendt 1958 cited in Barbour, Marshall &
Moore 2014, p. 2). In other words, there was an expectation that individuals perform different
personas in different settings.
Persona Studies places emphasis on the individual’s inherent task of constructing
identity through participation, considering it as an outcome alongside the emancipatory
potentials of participatory cultures. It theoretically allows for the possibility of one individual
having multiple personas, consisting of multiple dimensions (Moore, Barbour & Lee 2017),
which arguably better describes participatory media use in networked settings. Traditional
media personalities may use podcasting to create communities, build bodies of collective
intelligence and democratise the media landscape, but also because it allows them to grow their
transmedia personal brands. This position thus recasts individual participation as an important
economic task as well as a potentially social, cultural and political pursuit. Participation can
therefore lead to the empowering potentials that Jenkins wrote of, but also feed into the
commercial logics of traditional media hierarchies. As such, persona studies reveals concepts
that can be used to insightfully describe the contemporary use of the podcast with nuances not
currently considered in podcasting literature.
Kim Barbour has observed how variations in the performance of persona exist more
broadly in networked environments. In her research on persona construction of street artists,
tattooists, craftivists and performance poets, Barbour identified three registers of persona
performance – professional, personal and intimate (Barbour 2015). The practicing of these
various registers by individual artists revealed a process of selective self-presentation and the
“capacity for agency in persona creation” (Ibid., p. 59). Persona registers enabled the subjects to
retain some form of agency in experiences of tension that Barbour categorised as:
strategy/happenstance, specialisation/diversification, visibility/self-protection, self/collective
and work/play (Ibid., p. 61). For example, some of Barbour’s subjects employed a professional
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102
persona register to engage in networked environments where visibility and self-protection
were at odds. This involved revealing only certain aspects of their personalities online, which
was effective in distancing the artists from their work where a degree of anonymity was needed
– critical for street artists whose work is oftentimes deemed illegal (Ibid., p. 62). Barbour
further observed, “The personal register of performance extends the artist’s persona past that of
artistness, and gives their audience of fans and followers insight into the personality and values
of the person behind the work” (Ibid., p. 64). Additionally, artists observed employing an
intimate register of persona did so to discuss life matters and moments not linked to their art
practices, such as giving birth and taking drugs (Ibid., p. 67).
Barbour’s typology provides media scholars with a lexicon to understand nuanced
performance of persona across both traditional and DIY media networks, but also how these
personal brands are constructed within single podcast episodes. It proposes that networked
individuals have the ability to create discrete boundaries between these registers by
strategically performing personas, but also offers clarity as to how these performances may
operate in tandem. When applied to The Osher Günsberg Podcast Barbour’s concept creates
clarity for scholars but also for listeners, viewers and readers potentially helping them to
identify what persona register is being employed and importantly, to ask why and to what
effect.
These ideas from persona studies are not comprehensively considered in podcasting
discourse within media studies. Standing literature predominantly subscribes to the rhetoric of
participatory empowerment that stemmed from early media theories associated with Web 2.0
technologies. A persona studies approach has the potential to bring theories of strategic self-
presentation into conversation with these new media canons that now appear unable to
adequately describe contemporary phenomena such as the trend of branded media
personalities creating their own podcast shows. Importantly, a focus on the imperative to create
a networked persona with professional, personal and intimate registers draws academic
research into closer contact with commercial agendas being explored by high profile
conferences like the ABC’s OzPod event and will allow scholars to further explore exactly how
an individual’s brand is used to navigate a changing media landscape.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Dr Margie Borschke in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and
Cultural Studies at Macquarie University for her mentorship and supervision during the writing
of this research paper.
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TIMOTHY YEE
Abstract
Key Words
Introduction – Established Players Entering a New Market
Methodological Approach
Grassroots Beginnings: a brief history of podcasting and its potentials
The Podcast’s Second Coming: attention from big brands and big personalities
Participating to construct an intimate personal brand: Reading The Osher Günsberg Podcast
Potentials in Persona Studies
Acknowledgements
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