Dearest Cory:

An acquaintance has been encouraging me to listen to a bunch of “podcasts”, but I haven’t the faintest idea, beyond that it has something to do with radio, of what a Podcast actually is or how one should make use of it, except that I surmise from the name that it probably has something to do with this digital Walkman that I was once given as a gift.

I can take a computer apart and reassemble it, and I’m a part-time Linux geek, but when it comes to modern audio-visual equipment, I’m even more a Luddite than my deceased grandparents ever were when still breathing, so I’m a bit ashamed to admit to my friend my ignorance.

Can you shed any light on this, Cory?

Not one of the Pod People

Dear NOOTPP:

If you try to follow the seductive, deceptive and bewildering names that are given to new, recycled or repackaged technologies you will most assuredly run mad in the streets. Cory pictures you clutching your temples, trying to tear out your pre-frontal lobes in abject frustration, and can readily understand the impulse: enough with the technology. Cory has a tiny 1984 television of remarkable durability and has been trying to purchase a larger model, despite his abiding belief that something working perfectly shouldn’t be replaced. He was eroded by his friends’ nagging. His forays into the malls of commerce have been a ghastly exercise in trying to decipher the unintelligible offerings of various manipulative manufacturers, and not a success.

Will you permit Cory a historical example? When radio manufacturers in the early years of the twentieth century wished to pump up their products to increase sales, they described their radios’ improved circuitry as “Superheterodyne”. Admittedly, this term is impressive and mysterious. To modern ears, it may seem like a novel sexual orientation involving foodstuffs, but alas, nothing so interesting. You may be certain not one in a hundred radio purchasers in those days had the faintest idea what this term meant and how superheterodynamism might enhance their auditory experience. And so it can be with you: just because you are offered consumer bait does not mean you should gnaw on it.

Ned Ludd, for whom Luddites are named, had the insight, so needed in our own time, that new technologies have unforeseen (or uncared about) social side effects. Mr. Ludd dealt with new technologies by smashing them. Inspiring. How Cory has wished to take a ball-peen hammer to cellular telephones and to I-Pods whose scratchy headphone leakage he cannot escape on airplanes and buses. You must resist, NOOTPP, the urge to denigrate yourself for not understanding everything invented or not embracing every new gizmo and its arcana.

Cory can explain podcasting, but do you really want to know what aggregators, URIs and bitTorrent trackers are? Of course not. You need your evidently capacious brain for worthier, juicier cogitation. All you need to know is that podcasts are something to listen to and/or watch.

Be guided, if you will, by the “rule of two”. If a new technology cannot show you pictures and/or make sounds for you — on machines you already have — after no more than two movements from you (mouseclicks, knobs turned, buttons pushed), it is a technology trying to involve you in its inner workings and therefore not ready for reasonable people. If a technology fails the rule of two, you should next apply the “rule of delegated responsibility”. Here’s how: this acquaintance of yours needs guidance in moving from the category of savvy acquaintance to that of useful person or – let’s shoot for the moon – friend. You might approach it this way:

“How very kind of you to suggest something to bring pleasure and edification to my life! Let me tell you that I have an Edison cylinder phonograph, a compact disk player, some type of digital Walkthingie, and a DVD player in my computer. Would you be so gracious as to use your technotalents (of which I am in awe) to prepare me something containing these “podcast” whatchamadoodles and load it seamlessly at my house into one of the devices I already own and test it for me?”

He will undoubtedly respond that podcast downloading is something so simple a special-needs chimpanzee could do it, but you must be firm. He needs to finish what he starts.