Should We be Entertained?
However uncertain their future is, American public media have changed how people expect to hear stories. In recent years, the This American Life franchise has mixed memoir, narrative journalism, and longform on-location reporting to reach expansive audiences, and this year's S-Town has already broken download records.
Podcasts like these are very binegeable. They make my mile-ish walk to the library immersion into somewhere else, and they're hard to turn off once I find a desk to sit down.
But what bothers me isn't so much the digital-media addiction I've long succumbed to. Listening to S-Town, like Serial in 2014, I rather find myself asking how we should be hearing and talking about real people's suffering as these stories shape it.
Who are "we"? What are "these stories"? The questions are a little broad, but they rest on some common assumptions.
There is supposed to be a way to respond to suffering in fiction: with thoughts on the human condition and its artistry. Fiction that doesn't contribute to these thoughts is supposed to come in an appropriately cheap cover.
There is a way to respond to pain, especially faraway pain, in the news: with sober reflection on the world. News that doesn't contribute to these thoughts is supposed to come in an appropriate tabloid format.
Journalists used to separate tones and colors of serious journalism from the lurid and locally-flavored stuff. They called this latter kind "sensationalism", which shows the importance of normative ideas of emotional response in narratives of the real world.
Class and gender politics maintained this separation in part, like they do with so many others. Nevertheless, I think that the question of how we dispose ourselves as an audience to pain concerns more important issues than only our class-habituated self-image.
That Serial and S-Town turn on twists and reveals puts them more in the entertainment category than their public-radio producer hosts might say. We should also ask how this entertainment form can treat topics like mental illness, self-harm, and race and criminal justice.
Flannery O'Connor critiques the long tradition of entertaining metropolitans with the mythos of southern suffering, corruption, and decay. Whether the high literature she and William Faulkner represented broadened the moral imaginations of individual readers, they made a market for a combination of judgment, empathy, and voyeurism, which O'Connor names as the grotesque. These are legible throughout S-Town.
Even if S-Town and the others don't deal in tropes as tired as the Bible salesman O'Connor mentions, we should ask about how the entertainment orders the pleasures of anticipation approaching a story that belongs to someone other than the white, liberal, and urban voices of public media's franchises.
The pity and fear in Aristotle's Poetics evinces an ordered disposition of audience response to narrative art that is supposed to have its own order. The cathartic reactions to dramatic suffering were contained within unity of space and time of the theater. What we need, to my mind, is to consider how to be an audience when are not contained in the ritual structures of engagement like the Greek theater or the modern museum.
The stories these podcasts tell belong in a much wider world because of how we consume them, often while doing something else, and because of their reworking of lived experience. We are an audience to them, as we are distracted and entertained, and how we experiences stories such as they present ought to have something to do with how we are in the world.