I like NPR’s This American Life a lot. It’s a great example of how good speech radio can be and thanks to the magic of the Internet you can get it as a weekly podcast. The show, fronted by Ira Glass, tells stories by or about real Americans in interesting and innovative ways.
The podcast mixes up new shows with those from the archives and last night I found myself listening to one from 2002 – Classifieds, where the TAL team take one day’s classifieds ads in Chicago and digs out the stories behind them.
For the show it’s a means to an end but I was struck by the introduction. Firstly Ira contextualises the program as something of a historical document of a time gone by thanks to Craiglist decimating that part of the newspaper industry but then they talk about how the classifieds fit into the newspaper. While the “news” part is about the public life of the city, the classifieds about about “individual personal lives.”
As Ira puts it:
A public space where intensely private thoughts are being expressed all the time.
Sounds a bit like social media stuff, except it’s more pseudo-public spaces where pseudo-private thoughts are expressed. Although I do find myself thinking when I see a particularly cryptic message on Twitter, what’s the story behind that? And I know people have blown my tweets out of all proportion at times.
No great conclusions on this one. Just got me thinking. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Related reading: Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess from Wired looks at the free classifieds service and tries to work out why it works when from the outside it looks like it shouldn’t.