Podcasting and embodiment

Mainstream discourse about podcasting rarely discusses the affordances of the body. It rarely makes explicit the minimum requirements for participating, at the level of embodiment, or the bodily differences among users and producers that threaten to exclude some people from profitably using web audio and video.

Instead, mainstream discourse about podcasting tends to assume a certain ideal body type — a hearing, seeing, speaking, flexible, mouse-moving (as opposed to keyboard-using) user. Because the minimum requirements for participating are assumed, those who write about podcasting are generally not aware of the need or importance of accommodating technology to users with disabilities.

What if our understanding of web audio and video was grounded on a deep awareness of the body and bodily difference? What if our mainstream discourses did not automatically assume that podcasting, in the absence of transcripts or other accommodations, was accessible to all users? What if we were committed to teasing apart the differences between accessibility and availability, instead of assuming that accessibility was equivalent to making it easy for an ideal user to download files?

In Disability and the Teaching of Writing (2008), Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Jo Brueggemann ask us to reflect on the body and bodily difference in the context of writing instruction:

How can we better understand learning and writing as embodied practices, foregrounding bodily difference instead of demanding bodily perfection? (3)

Applied to web audio and video, this question urges us to consider the extent to which our understanding of podcasting (as reflected in discourse) is grounded on bodily perfection, the ways in which the body is absent from podcasting discourse, and whether our conceptions of users are normative (e.g. insofar as hearing is required for conformance).