Podcasts: Fast Fashion and The Mushroom Festival
Rhetorical Context:
Both of these podcasts were made for classes with a focus on design: Technology Studio and Multimedia and Visual Rhetoric One.
The goals of the first podcast, an informational artifact about the collapse of the Rana Plaza sweatshop due to unsafe working conditions in the fast fashion industry, was made in the style of NPR’s All Things Considered. Its purpose, similar to that of the news program, was to inform viewers of the impacts of the fast fashion industry on workers in Bangladesh through the lens of this event raising awareness about the impacts of fast fashion. The audience for this piece is similar to NPRs audience which is mostly upper income Americans over the age of 35. This audience would have limited knowledge of the Fast Fashion scene, which mainly markets toward middle to lower income people under the age of 30. Given that the Rana Plaza collapse was not covered heavily in the United States, the audience would likely have little knowledge of the event.
The goal of the second podcast was to encourage viewers to donate to the mushroom festival and attend the event. The podcast was based on a fictitious interview style podcast called Chester County Treasures where events and people within Chester County, such as the mushroom festival were highlighted to increase attendance at various events as well as general town pride. Due to the niche nature of this podcast, the main audience was people in this county or in the tristate area as a whole; people who could travel to the events advertised. The audience for this podcast based on podcast listeners from around the United States were most likely middle aged and higher income. Listeners were also those likely to be curious about their home county, already looking for events to go to or places to see.
Rhetorical Decisions:
In the first podcast I made, I relied almost entirely on the genre conventions of NPR’s All Things Considered, shaping my audio design, music choice and organization around the structure of their episodes. I did this to meet listener expectations and also to build off of the rhetorical choices made by actual NPR podcasters. I noticed that podcasters used appropriately emotional music to set the tone of the episode very early on, right after the introduction in most cases, to give the listener a sense of what they could expect as well as to make an emotional appeal before the story even began. I mimicked this in my own podcast, choosing somber and impactful music to set a tone of sincerity and loss before explaining what had happened at the plaza. I also noticed the use of sound scapes to help set the scene for visual storytelling. This increased the presence and vividness of the pieces it was used in by making viewers draw a clearer visual image of what was occuring with the help of sound. To invoke this vividness, I included the soundscape of a crowd accompanied by cars passing by on the street when describing the yearly gathering of people to honor those lost in the collapse.
In the second podcast, due to the distribution company being entirely fictitious, I had to create the genre conventions and organization myself; instead of copying the conventions of a specific source, I wanted to create some conventions of my own. I started with laying out the podcast in the format of: introduction, advertisement, interview and conclusion/call to action. To follow the expected conventions of a podcast and guide viewers through their listening experience, I included transitions in the form of music or silence between each segment. I also began each section with a statement that clearly signaled what the section contained. For example, I started the interview section with an introduction to the interviewee after some context surrounding who he as a mushroom farmer was signaling the focus of the interview and the identity of Joe Grasso. This, along with the logical organization within the piece, creates an appeal to reason, making the audience more likely to listen and understand.
Reflections:
Both of these pieces were received well in the classroom setting. Feedback I received on the first piece to incorporate more space between the transitions in order to guide readers through the piece I incorporated into the next which worked especially well given I was creating my own layout rather than following a guide. Through this process, I learned how to examine genre and create a piece using genre conventions that is not necessarily a copy of the piece. This realization has informed my work process beyond just podcast creation. Now, when examining genres I make note of what I want to include and conversely don’t want to include from multiple sources and allow that to inform my final product.