Podcasting Before Electricity
In a previous blog post, I wrote about FDR’s Fireside Chats. They were the first kind of “podcasting” made available to us. But if you really think about audio communication, before we had the means to record and broadcast it, this type of passing stories from person-to-person has been going on throughout the ages.
Even before the written word, everything we knew as a species was passed down through storytelling – spoken word communication from one person, and generation, to the next.
If you think of a Medieval village, you can easily imagine the town crier; someone who stood on a stump or soapbox and read the news so that everyone in town knew what was going on.
Even though audio communication wasn’t being recorded or broadcasted via our modern technology, stories and information were passed forward. So the idea that podcasting is something new simply isn’t true: it’s just a new way of distributing content.
Listeners don’t have to head to the town square to get the news anymore. They can relax in their recliner and click a link or download it to their phone and go for a jog. But it’s really nothing different. It’s simply human beings telling each other stories.
And that’s what we help you do at Shortcut Content. We audibly collect your stories, news, and information and then translate it into podcasts, blog posts, and videos so that your customers can easily access that information in a variety of forms. It’s not a new form a communication – it’s a new way of accessing it.