Using radio and podcast studies as its main scholarship areas, this paper will examine the potential for Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to change podcasting both in how it is crafted and in how audiences consume podcasts. Focusing on the idea of intimacy this paper interrogates how this defining characteristic of “sound-based digital media” (Hilmes, 2013:44) may persist and evolve, particularly through conceptualizations of space and place, imagined and actual. In a landscape where podcasting is increasingly perceived by (mostly younger) audiences and creators to be a visual medium (Berry, 2023), I want to explore how intimacy may continue to be a defining characteristic of podcasting. In particular, and going well beyond just the aural or indeed beyond the combination of the visual and the aural, I want to understand what intimacy can mean when podcasting moves into the virtual reality immersive space.

This paper’s case study is the video version of episode 398 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, which is an interview with Facebook and Meta’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, titled 'First Interview in the Metaverse'. In the podcast, the two meet in the metaverse to discuss the new possibilities that this technology, in combination with AI, may open in the ways that humans communicate with each other through the internet. Looking at themes such as disembodiment, imagination and materiality, this paper examines what VR and AI technologies can mean for podcasting and the way audiences and podcasters may communicate and create meaning through them.

A century ago amidst the emergence of radio broadcasting, cultural critics called for responsible consumption of the new mass medium, decrying the development of sustained, emotionally attuned listening practices. In time, distracted radio listening was accepted as the norm. However, as podcasting grew throughout the 2000s and 2010s, scholars and producers widely embraced an idealized image of the podcast listener as highly attentive – frequently citing careful, immersive headphone listening as a key distinction between radio and podcasting. Yet, in recent years as podcasting has become more mainstream, it is no longer reasonable to assume that listening habits and experiences are singular or steady. This paper explores the possibility of a plurality of modern listening positions by drawing on historical and theoretical discourses of perception from media and cultural studies, multidisciplinary research on boredom and distraction, and contemporary sound studies scholarship on affect, aural experience, and sonic geographies. With the overwhelming number of podcasts being produced (an estimated 2.4 million active podcasts worldwide), podcasting is becoming a ubiquitous presence in modern life, much like music. And with this ubiquity, the way audiences listen is shifting. The paper looks at the example of sleep podcasts and “sleep story” apps (e.g. Calm) to explore how podcasts and related digital audio media are embracing fragmentary, ephemeral content, some even purposefully designed to be boring. Listeners are using these podcasts to control how they engage with their environment, often to create distractions and disconnect.

Like other media industries (e.g. music, film, TV), the podcasting industry has spent the last year coming to grips with the impact that generative artificial intelligence tools will have on the future of podcast production and consumption. Several high-profile examples of AI-generated podcasts have raised questions about the ethics, legality, and creativity of AI for creating podcast scripts, voices, and sound design. These in turn raise larger concerns about ownership and the economics of the platforms that distribute podcasts (like Spotify). In this paper, I survey the state of artificial intelligence in the podcasting industry to address the following two questions: How is AI being used by podcasters and other actors in the podcasting industry? How is the use of AI in podcasting framed in articles and writing about the industry? By sampling a number of podcasts that employ AI during the production and consumption process (e.g. AI scriptwriting, AI voiced hosts, AI sound design, etc.), my paper explores how podcasters and others in the podcasting industry are using AI as part of their everyday work. I develop a typology for the different ways AI is currently being used in podcasting in order to explore the anxieties around the use of artificial intelligence in the cultural industries as well as the everyday, and more mundane, impact AI is having on workflows, production capabilities and notions of creativity in the creative industries.

This study aims to theorize the parasocial relationships between podcast creators and listeners, but with a unique focus on the perspective of the creators themselves. While parasocial relationships are typically studied from the perspective of the audience, understanding the creator's viewpoint can provide valuable insights into the dynamics of these relationships and the modes of addressivity they evoke, particularly with the emergence of intimacy as a keyword in podcast studies (Swiatek, 2018; Spinelli & Dann, 2019; Euritt, 2020, 2023). Through in-depth interviews with prominent podcasters in the Israeli podcast scene, we explore: How do podcast creators imagine their listeners? How are these imagined listeners shaped by the creators’ personal dispositions, their own experiences as podcast listeners, their assumptions about podcasting as a medium, and their actual interactions with their listeners? We argue that the starting point for the postulated intimacy between podcasters and listeners is an imagined addressee whom the podcaster conceives as similar to themselves. Just as authors imagine their audience as they write novels, we assume that the creator’s imagined audience impacts the actual audience that emerges. We also argue that this addressee is brought into being through a shared understanding of intimacy as authenticity, even though only the notion of intimacy actually implies some form of relationship. In making these arguments, we propose a typology of different kinds of imagined relationships with perceived listeners, contributing to a more complex understanding of podcasting and its cultural meaning.