During the final university meeting in 2019 with my original primary supervisor, Dr. Kate Bowles, she recommended that I write about my experience as a podcast listener, in order to record what I enjoy about the medium. Focusing on how I listen and engage with open tech podcasts in particular, the motivation was to record why I held this interest before it were possibly too late in the academic process and I forget my initial purpose and motivation. As she explained, life can change drastically when you take several years to complete a PhD research project part-time, as mine has: I now have two children who did not exist when this project started. I am grateful for that piece of advice that Kate gave me, and since her retirement, it has been wonderful to consider these shifts and discuss them with my ongoing supervisors, Dr. Christopher Moore and Dr. Benjamin Ball.
The following autoethnographic sections explain what led me to my podcast fandom, starting with blogging, RSS and podcasting in general. It also includes moments of analytical reflexivity that demonstrate how I approach participants’ recorded narratives in my written thesis. As an initial example of analytical reflexivity, this very text was originally intended to be in my thesis; however, whether it was due to my own maturation as a researcher or the terrifying number of words that I had written beyond the maximum (both, to be honest), I decided to extract it and upload it as a blog post on the Really Specific Stories podcast website. This way, my own fan motivation and research background can accompany the very narrative archive that I have presented as original podcast research. You do not need to read the thesis to understand my position here, and importantly, my narrative is not front and centre on this website, which is the way it should be.
Discovering Open Tech Podcasts
My first experience with RSS-based podcasts was soon after the launch of the iTunes Store in Australia, which was introduced first in the United States in 2003. At that time, I was shifting to high school and the idea of a digital marketplace like iTunes was incredibly exciting, as we had long used CDs as a family, carrying stacks in the car during road trips to holiday destinations. It was fun to play songs with the ‘random’ setting in the car and at home in the six-stack player—the term ‘shuffle’ was not ubiquitous yet—however, the ability to rip CDs and buy content was tantalising.
I received an iPod mini for Christmas in 2004, which was my first chance to have a personal music collection. I began to download and customise my own library of content, in line with my iTunes account (Apple ID). The iPod experience built on my own early fandom for Apple computers, as I taught myself how to use various aspects of the Mac operating system from the age of five with our first Power Macintosh (then branded as Mac OS, then Mac OS X, then OS X and now macOS) and later visited articles online to extend my knowledge when I could not find answers.
As a teenager, I was ignorant of the purpose of podcasts. I had never listened to talk-back radio or any chat shows, on which some of the earliest podcast formats were based, so the idea of syncing such programmes to my iPod was not attractive to me. Whilst Apple had made it easy to do, the whole concept seemed nebulous in contrast to downloading and ripping songs, which were just audio files that you listened to in albums or playlists. How did these podcasts end up in the directory, how often were they updated and why should I care? Looking back, I was simply inexperienced—as an established medium, radio had never served much of a purpose in my life beyond background music at home or in the car with family. When I reflect on this time and the podcast content that was available and advertised, much of it was initially on-demand radio shows that had been live broadcasts first. The idea of a purpose-built podcast, planned as a unique show in the Apple iTunes Directory, did not yet exist beyond the earliest experimentation by people like Adam Curry. The common idea for podcasts then was to provide an on-demand service for radio shows, uploaded shortly after airing so that you could catch up down the line.
Furthermore, my experience with blogs and RSS in a written context was minimal. I mention blogs as they are the foundation of podcasts—podcasts are essentially blog posts with audio files shared through RSS, after all. As a kid, I was an enthusiastic user of websites and email in the age of dial-up, but again, I was too young to understand the nature and value of blogs. As a student, my focus was on reading books and magazines. My ignorance of longer-form blogging continued later in high school when I joined what could now be referred to generally as the ‘social media revolution’ as a part of Web 2.0. With the ease of use and communication that came with microblogging platforms like Facebook, I did not see any need to explore extended writing and file-sharing platforms like WordPress or Blogger. Like many others, my Web experience (aside from occasional news-reading and online shopping with minimal disposable income) was funnelled into the narrow channel of endlessly scrolling, more closed feeds, with people who were labelled as my ‘friends’.
According to Rushkoff’s (2016) model of digital industrialism (ranging from 1990 to 2015), my early experience with the Web had been framed by privatised apps that were optimised by platform monopolies for global scale and exponential growth. My online habits were driven by algorithms that, as Rushkoff (2016) outlines, prioritise file replication over collaboration and which lead to the destruction of value rather than an exchange of value.
My first real exposure to blogging as a creative outlet and a way to express myself and meet people (through collaborative networks) was at the University of Wollongong. Introduced to platforms like Ning and WordPress, we were encouraged as communication students to establish a consistent, individual voice on the Web, submitting online assignments as extended blog pieces that aligned with weekly topics. It was the first period in which I was really producing something substantial on the Web and not merely being a consumer who gave occasional bite-sized commentary.
We were told that having a blog at least would be important for any future academic or career opportunities, as an outlet for critical thought and personal expression—a place online to call our own. I accepted this purely as a part of my tertiary education; however, as time went on and I became more focused on my Honours studies and then job-searching, my commitment to any blogging beyond my communication subjects died. Without that structure and the constant feedback from people I actually knew, which social media networks gave in the form of instant dopamine hits such as 'likes' and comments, there was no real motivation to continue.
My WordPress blog, then called ‘martinfeld.wordpress.com', sat idle and languished for a few years. I thought about doing more with it but I struggled to decide what I should write and I was unsure how to attract people to read it. These were the same basic doubts that I had when considering setting up a personal website with iWeb, an app that came with the iLife Suite on every Mac. With this now defunct app, you could establish a personal blog on the desktop and share it with family and friends. Like my early exposure to podcasts and blogs on the Web, I was too young to know what to do with it, although it contributed to my personal view of Apple products and services being cool and simple to use. My early experience with WordPress and writing posts that were available through RSS informs my own research design decisions today in this project—using the service Fireside to host accessible podcast episodes at www.rsspod.net with an integrated blog to explain my ethics and production process in writing.
It was not until 2015, when I began my first full-time job after university at the German-Australian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Sydney, that I started to engage directly with blogs and podcasts. During my regular daily commute to the office, which lasted two hours one way, I had a lot of time to digest news and spoken content, such as the Apple-centric site Daring Fireball by writer and podcaster John Gruber, who is known for his work on the Mac writing-app BBEdit, collaboration on the now defunct iOS note-taking app Vesper and the invention of Markdown, which is a markup language that offers a simpler way of formatting text for the Web than HTML.
Up until this time, most of the Apple-related news that I had consumed was in printed magazines or on larger sites such as Macworld, MacDailyNews and The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Although these sites identified individual contributors and freelance writers, they were presented as larger groups and publications and tended to focus on rumours and general product news. I discovered through these sites that Gruber was a respected voice with great authority in the broader Apple community of users, developers and commentators. Reading Daring Fireball became a daily ritual for me and I soon rediscovered and finally appreciated podcasts when I listened to his accompanying programme, The Talk Show with John Gruber. Episodes often exceed two hours, with each one featuring John as the main host and a rotating list of friends, past colleagues and fellow Apple fans as guests. With this focus on Apple loaded into original, podcast-first programming, I understood the value of the platform as a way for independent producers to get together and discuss their passion. Furthermore, by that time Apple had refined the process of streaming and downloading podcasts in its dedicated iOS app, so there was less friction in discovering shows and adding them to your queue—without the need to plug an iPod into a Mac and import using iTunes. Things had become much easier as the world had shifted to mobile devices and I understood the appeal of regular podcast updates.
Reflecting on that time, in my own blogging and reading of others’ sites, I was entering a state of communicative capitalism and what may be termed Apple-centric blogipelagos (Dean, 2010) (Taffel, 2019)—segregated and disconnected islands of conversation—which, while positive, have formed my own views of the brand’s technology and my bias and preference for certain podcast formats and app interfaces that are explored in my PhD thesis.
Through the rotation of guests on Gruber's show and links to others’ articles on his site, I discovered more people in the community, such as the three hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP), who are Casey Liss, Marco Arment and John Siracusa. Like Gruber, these co-hosts are driven to discuss the world of Apple not only by their own nostalgia but in their professional careers as developers for the Mac and for iOS: Liss has produced a number of popular apps over time, such as Callsheet and Peek-a-View; Arment worked at Tumblr, founded Instapaper and develops the independent podcast client Overcast; and Siracusa has developed niche utilities for the Mac, such as SwitchGlass and Front and Center, and also wrote at Ars Technica as the official reviewer for 11 different versions of the Mac OS X operating system, before it switched to the 'macOS' brand name.
With further exposure to an Apple-centric tech podcast such as ATP, I realised the value of podcasting to this online community in not only discussing new products, but educating each other about their use and addressing listeners’ technical and historical questions. Whereas Gruber was a lone writer and podcaster with rotating guests, Liss, Arment and Siracusa were three Mac enthusiasts who lived in different American states but recorded with each other by using Skype (and later, Zoom) on the desktop. I had been familiar with Tumblr and Instapaper while at university and started to connect the dots in terms of who knew whom in the community. Finally, it clicked that I knew Siracusa from my earlier reading of Ars Technica. I would always read the site’s guides for Mac OS X with each major release and was consistently flabbergasted by the length, detail and insightful analysis by this devoted writer who had loved the Mac since its release in 1984. Over time, I came to respect Siracusa, who is arguably one of the most devoted and long-term users of the platform and became a fan of his co-hosts through their share discussion. Even other users in the community who are regarded as veterans have not been Mac users for that long.
At the time that I was listening to ATP, I became more aware of the fact that Twitter was the social-media glue that connected the discussion of many of these bloggers, podcasters and their respective sites. I joined Twitter back in 2010 whilst at university and did not understand it well at first, but then recognised the platform’s power to connect users with people beyond their regular network of friends (à la Facebook). What seemed at first to be a strange way to yell into the void was actually a channel to follow and chat with almost anyone. In the ATP theme song, recorded by musical Apple enthusiast Jonathan Mann—also the writer of the Apple-fan-favourite iPhone Antenna Song from the ‘Antennagate’ scandal, connecting the dots!—the following lyrics were included to encourage you to connect with the hosts on Twitter:
...and if you're into Twitter, you can follow them: at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s... now that's Casey Liss; m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-e-n-t... Marco Arment; s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a... Siracusa!
From then on, I followed these hosts as I became familiar with their voices and then went on to discover more people in the community. With recurring guests on The Talk Show with John Gruber, references to the broader community on ATP and linked conversational threads on Twitter, I then discovered another large component of the Apple-podcast fan community: Relay FM.
The first Relay FM show of which I became aware was Connected (originally called The Prompt), featuring co-founders Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett, along with head of the Apple news site MacStories, Federico Viticci. At first, the podcast felt different from the two others that I liked, as each of the hosts is from a different country: Hackett is from Memphis, United States; Hurley is from London, England; and Viticci is from Rome, Italy. The premise of their show and artwork is that they are connected by technology but each live in different nations. Furthermore, Hackett is a serious Mac enthusiast, while Hurley and Viticci have generally preferred iOS and iPadOS over time, but use the Mac to support and supplement their daily working lives in places where the others have been lacking as relatively younger platforms.
In the early days of listening to Connected on my commute, I found myself dropping in and out of the show every so often, sometimes even unsubscribing. This was due to my occasional intolerance of the format, as they would meander or crack numerous jokes, which, although they were funny, could disrupt the flow of conversation when I was trying to get through numerous shows in a fixed commute time. It took a while to appreciate their chemistry and role of the show as the original in the network’s line-up, as I accepted a varied format that was less committed to enthusiasm for the Mac; I was narrower in my product focus as a brand fan then. Hurley and Viticci would single out Hackett as a ‘dad figure’ whenever he would speak at length about the Mac and its history, when they would prefer to discuss iOS-specific concepts like user automation like Shortcuts app and touch-first interfaces.
Furthermore, I learnt more about the foundation of Relay FM, with Hackett and Hurley sharing stories about how they started in podcasting, such as Hurley’s background as a banker. He had aspirations to become a full-time, independent podcaster and the straw that broke the camel’s back was during a morning walk to his old job, when his shoelace broke and he decided that he did not want to go to the effort of buying a new shoelace for his dress shoes, which, in his mind, was a frustrating investment in a job that he no longer enjoyed.
In a similar way to how I discovered my first Relay FM show, I started to learn more about other shows on the network as they mentioned them on Connected. The next Relay FM show that I discovered, which became one of my favourite podcasts, was Upgrade. Hackett is one of the two co-hosts on this show, collaborating with popular Apple-focused writer Jason Snell. Originally working as a journalist for publications like Macworld, Snell joined Relay FM early in the piece, bringing his then-new show Upgrade to Relay FM and welcoming Hurley as a host.
With all of his experience in writing about Apple technology and fandom, Snell is a prolific blogger and podcaster and motivated me to learn more about independent work in this space. Moreover, he is a rare breed in the Apple blogosphere, as he frequently touts the benefits of both macOS and iOS, choosing to use both platforms in relative harmony, with different devices in specific contexts.
My desire to follow and connect with podcasters' connected blogs and Twitter profiles was the catalyst for my current status as complete-member researcher (Adler and Adler, 1987, in Ellis and Bochner, 2000) upon which I built to gain entry into the Apple-centric open-tech podcasting space and subsequently interview known producers. This has been quite the shift from my earliest feelings of more traditional parasocial interaction with such producers (Horton and Wohl, 1956), as I have come to speak directly with them and maintain contact as appropriate for my PhD project.
Over time, I mentally pieced together the digitally-distributed network of collaborative podcasts and crowdfunded membership schemes (Rushkoff, 2016) and began to understand how tech podcasters constructed their online brands according to Moore, Barbour and Lee’s (2017) five dimensions of online persona: public, mediatised, performative, collective and having intentional value. In the case of Relay FM founders Hurley and Hackett, they run their own network, appear on others’ podcasts and also maintain personal blogs and further podcast paratext, which includes numerous visual sites and interfaces such as social profiles, membership channels and show archives (Beckstead, 2025). They are switching constantly between different registers of performance and moderating the intimacy of their own value dimension, according to whether they are guests on others’ shows or speaking directly to (and collectively with) listening fans who, for example, may listen to the Connected podcast.
Mapping this to my own experience, I found my own level of personal sharing and performance shifting, depending on whether I was producing the solo show Lounge Ruminator on my WordPress-hosted site, co-hosting Hemispheric Views and 3x2 Photocast or maintaining an institutional (or paid ‘professional’) tone on Voices of BlueScope, a show that I produce for my employer. Although I am a complete-member researcher in the tech podcasting community, listeners stumbling on a show such as Voices of BlueScope would not be aware of this dimension of my public persona. Therefore, I have found myself self-editing for a perceived audience online, which has tangible effects on my own authenticity or how intimately I may connect with listeners.
Paying for Podcast Membership
Regarding the term ‘member’, I soon transformed from simply having a shared sense of identity or community to being a paying subscriber or member of podcast networks. I began to discover a variety of shows on Relay FM with different topics, such as Reconcilable Differences, Top Four, Ungeniused, Mac Power Users, Thoroughly Considered, Analog(ue), Adapt and even the occasional behind-the-scenes mini-show B-Sides. Most of all, I found my nostalgia and fandom peaking with Jason Snell’s podcast documentary series 20 Macs for 2020, in which he interviewed people from across the online community about a range of influential Mac products and designs. Now fully aware that this was a podcast-first network and community of creative producers, I became more interested in supporting the business as a member.
Relay FM, like other independent network sites, uses an online platform called Memberful to provide a membership login and account system for fans. I signed up for a recurring membership, choosing to support the network as a whole for a monthly fee of US$5 at the time (there has also been the option to support specific shows). With the membership, I gained access to further podcasts, such as Fusion (a member-only show with Hackett, who speaks to various hosts of the Relay FM shows about a tech topic each month) and Members Only (another exclusive show that features special bonus content, such as a director’s commentary-style episode with synchronised discussion with Andy Sorkin’s biopic Steve Jobs). Furthermore, I started to receive a monthly newsletter and I ordered items from the store, such as Relay-FM-logo and fifth-anniversary pins. Merchandise and the Memberful platform are promoted as benefits by other sites in the broader community, such as: ATP, Jason Snell’s site with blogger Dan Moren, Six Colors; Viticci’s MacStories; and Ben Thompson’s Stratechery.
Until this point, I had understood podcasting—at least in the Apple-focused blogosphere—to be based purely on ad-supported shows that run through free and open RSS feeds. Access to shows such as Fusion and Members Only, along with Snell’s Six Colors Secret Subscriber Podcast and Thompson’s daily articles for members of Stratechery, made me aware of the creative ways that open tech podcasters can support their independent businesses. RSS, whilst accessible and easy to add to any podcast or reader client of choice, was being ‘locked down’ in a way, so that listeners and readers can only gain access to content by paying. This being said, priced content may be shared among listeners if they are all made aware of the feed’s necessary password. Whilst more closed than a regular advertised or listed RSS feed on a blog, this is different from the idea of a walled garden or service-specific content offering, such as the exclusive shows that Spotify has promoted over time. Member-only podcasts using RSS are a kind of secret that can (but should not) be shared openly.
As I have heard more podcasters on Relay FM and associated hosts’ own shows discuss what podcasting means to them, I have come to agree with their definition of a podcast in a technical sense. To them, a podcast is (traditionally) an audio show that is offered in an RSS feed, which can be added to any client. If it is tied to a certain host, such as Spotify, SoundCloud, Amazon or YouTube, or is scraped and disassociated from its original presence on the Web, then it does not fit the ideal of an accessible stream of content that is based on the open Web. According to the purists’ definition, it ceases to be a podcast and becomes a closed, paid audio show that happens to share a similar style and format, whether scripted or conversational. Podcasts, then, are defined by open, Apple-centric tech podcasters not only by their content and style, but the way that they are delivered to and enjoyed by the listener. Also, although I have listened to podcasts from other genres regularly before, such as Revisionist History, ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone and Zeit Online’s Wird das was?, many of these shows are quite scripted or use a more typical interview format. Tech-focused chatcasts by podcast-first producers and networks commonly follow a set of structured 'show notes' that ensure a smooth flow of interrelated topics; however, the style of communication and discussion is very casual and conversational. As a listener, it feels as though you are being spoken to directly or even in the room with them, which links to the aforementioned concept of parasociality.
When I first started to follow podcasts regularly, I also used the Apple Podcasts app exclusively, which is the native app on iOS and now macOS with its desktop equivalent. As I listened to more shows and started to recognise and understand the various personalities and their voices, I became open to more ideas about computing and what it means to be a fan and member of the community. Marco Arment of ATP and other Relay FM shows is a developer of the podcast client Overcast, which is one of many third-party alternatives to Apple's own dominant native app. I began to use Overcast after I realised its additional benefits, such as a ‘Smart Speed’ function that reduces lengthy silence, transfer of downloaded episodes to Apple Watch for phone-free listening, better support for marked MP3 chapters and even video-clip sharing of podcast segments for use and referral with other listeners online. According to Rushkoff’s (2016) category for marketing under digital distributism, Overcast may be understood as a ‘utility’ or ‘legacy’ product, as it emphasises the use of open RSS, rich, HTML show notes, enhancement of audio quality (‘Voice Boost’), options for speed adjustment (‘Smart Speed’) and promotion of others’ shows within the app. Altogether, this focuses on product attributes and company ethics, rather than big data and prediction that is associated with digital industrialism. Continuting to use Rushkoff’s (2016) terminology, this is in contrast to the ‘brand icon’ status that comes with an app like Apple Podcasts or algorithmic customisation enabled through big data in an app like Spotify. Increasingly, I found my own podcast-listening experience to be mediated and framed by Arment’s app, which solidified my support of the community. My devotion to the app might also have had its own limiting effects, as I have come to interpret the medium and its associated paratext through the software design and interface choices of one man in the community. I have enjoyed living in Arment’s grey zone of hybrid media, but now understand that my own preferences have been influenced by his decisions, which, as Scolari (2014) asserts in his ninth law of the interface, can be political.
Using Supplementary Media within the Broader Paratext
In addition to listening to podcasts, I have interacted on a regular basis with hosts and other listeners across a range of platforms, most notably Twitter—until the community shifted mainly to Mastodon as an alternative in the Fediverse, following Elon Musk’s purchase of the social-media site and its controversial rebranding to ‘X’. Twitter had once been the de facto glue for podcasters in the Apple fan community, as it was a popular cross-platform communication system for tech enthusiasts in its early days.
To avoid clogging my former Twitter experience and now Mastodon feed, I only followed a few of the relevant podcast profiles and assigned others to a custom ‘Podcasting’ list in my account, which acts much like the Relay FM master feed for episode updates.
As a member, I also enjoy the Relay FM newsletter and have engaged with the fan community on Discord, whilst also purchasing Relay FM and ATP apparel and products and discovering a range of other podcasts by network co-hosts who have their own businesses, networks and side projects, which are explored below.
In 2018, I joined Micro.blog, a priced social media network and blogging platform. Created by developer Manton Reece, the idea of the network is to promote more open blogging and communication through the IndieWeb, which is ‘…a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”’ and ‘…a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content’ (IndieWeb, 2025). In my experience, Micro.blog has been a space that is free of advertising, algorithmic recommendations and a much lower level of abuse that occurs on other networks, such as Facebook, Instagram and X. While there has been room for Micro.blog to grow, it is naturally limited by the fact that it costs at least five US dollars per month to have a full account.
I enjoyed Micro.blog so much when I started using it that it was ultimately one of the major deciding factors for leaving Instagram, as I had already done with Facebook. Micro.blog offers an experience that is a cross between WordPress and the former Twitter, albeit even more minimalistic, and I was able to import all of my previous photos from Instagram into my new blog on the platform. Many people on Micro.blog are also technologically-inclined, so I have had much to talk about with other Mac and general tech enthusiasts over time.
Since using it, I have been exposed even further to the community's love of RSS, as I discovered the rereleased, open-source version of the famous NetNewsWire app by Micro.blog user and Mac developer Brent Simmons. Furthermore, I have come to understand the value of RSS as a more open standard through Manton Reece's Micro.blog-specific development podcast Timetable, his separate tech show Core Intuition with fellow Micro.blog user and Mac developer Daniel Jalkut and also the Micro Monday podcast, which was hosted by former Micro.blog Community Manager and founder of App Camp for Girls, Jean MacDonald. Each episode of Micro Monday featured a new and different Micro.blog user in an interview each week.
Although much of my consumption and interaction on Micro.blog and NetNewsWire has been text-based, many users there and people in my subscribed RSS feeds discuss what they love about podcasts and even produce their own. I was sceptical of the word ‘community’ in an online sense in the past, even when referring to fans; however, I am more accepting of the term now after joining this network, as the technical underpinnings and omission of algorithmic manipulation lead to a much higher number of genuine replies from users. I receive a much higher number of responses on Micro.blog and have had considerably more conversation there since 2018 than in the ten years that I have spent on Twitter.
Also, like many users of NetNewsWire and similar RSS services, fast-forwarding to 2026 my own use of the app was challenged by software developer Terry Godier, who released his alternative app, Current. Teasing the release of his app in an extended blog post titled ‘Phantom Obligation’, he explained how Brent Simmons’s design choices for NetNewsWire were adapted from the email inbox, whose numerical app badges went on to influence social media apps (Godier, 2026, n.p., emphasis in original)
He made a pragmatic decision, not an ideological one. RSS was unknown to most people in 2002. By using a familiar layout, something people already understood from email, he reduced the learning curve to almost nothing.
It worked. NetNewsWire took off. Google Reader took off. A thousand readers bloomed, and nearly all of them borrowed Brent's basic shape. …
Email's unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response. The number isn't neutral information. It's a measure of social debt.
But when we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause. …
“We copied the inbox and forgot to leave the guilt behind.”
Combined, Godier’s (2026) article and my subsequent use of the app Current have been nothing short of eye-opening, as I realised how the RSS reading interface that was born in NetNewsWire has shaped not only the visual experience of following blogs but the entire delivery mechanism and consumption habits of podcast distribution and listening, as new episodes arrive and create that same sense of phantom obligation. You must catch the latest episode, even if no one is checking and producers cannot tell through analytics if you actually listened. Such a revelation echoes Scolari’s (2019a,b,c,d,e; 2020) following laws of the interface, in that they: are the place of interaction (1); are not transparent (2); evolve (4); coevolve with their users (5); don’t disappear, they transform (6); and are the place of innovation (10). Even as late in my project as 2026, I am reassessing my relationship with podcasts and RSS, how participants’ narrative responses may be interpreted and whether my own practices enact digital distributism or merely reproduce digital industrialism.
My experiences on Micro.blog, NetNewsWire, Current and Mastodon have all influenced my views of podcasting—in particular, the issue of data portability through RSS and being able to shift your own blog or audiocontent between hosts, without being locked into one system, such as a platform capitalist (Srnicek, 2017) like Spotify for audio or Twitter/X for interaction with other community members. The issue of data portability and openness has been emphasised by the tech-podcast community’s shift to the Fediverse through instances (or servers) on Mastodon.
Realising My Own Creativity
Up until this point, I have been describing both my earlier and later experiences of podcast and blog consumption. Now, I wish to expand on my path to becoming predominantly a producer. After years of listening to podcasts and then choosing to embark on a PhD project, Dr. Kate Bowles then suggested that I attempt my own podcast production in order to participate fully in the art and industry, while also gaining new knowledge, experience and perspective.
Before the start of my PhD, my first-ever experience of being included in a podcast was episode 53 of Micro Monday, which was hosted and produced by former Micro.blog Community Manager, Jean MacDonald, and a participant in my Really Specific Stories project.
To open myself to different ways of doing things, taking cues from my experience on Micro Monday and Kate’s suggestions, I decided to use both of my sites online for this endeavour; each blog would have its own podcast, which reinforces the importance of my exposure to supplementary media (or paratext), such as blogging services. The first podcast, Lounge Ruminator, is a show that acts as an audio extension of my blog of the same name, which is hosted on WordPress and published using the supported RSS feed to Apple's podcast directory and further apps. On that site, I have written numerous articles and opinion pieces, many of which I have referred to as 'ruminations'. These written pieces focused on a particular thought that I have had recently or something that I have observed; the audio versions featured topics that are not written on the site. Prior to my increased commitment to thesis writing and the supporting production of the Really Specific Stories podcast, I aimed to post a new episode each week and keep things to a shorter duration. Consequently, many would refer to Lounge Ruminator as a 'microcast'. Uploading podcasts is the same as written blog pieces and I generally use the WordPress Web interface on iOS to do this, depending on which device I am using.
Feld Notes was my second show and also a microcast, which I published using the Micro.blog companion app Wavelength. At that stage, the show was a more sporadic programme that featured interviews with my maternal grandmother, Penka, about her life, family and migration from the former Yugoslavia to Australia in the 1970s.
Whilst the uploading and hosting methods were different, my production method has remained the same: so far, I have used my iPad Pro exclusively for podcast editing, using the app Ferrite Recording Studio by Wooji Juice for editing and exporting. I have loved using this app with my Apple Pencil, as the stylus, although a more indirect mechanism for interaction than a finger, actually offers a more precise way of moving the playhead across the audio timeline. I took this idea from Relay FM host Jason Snell, who has long used Ferrite on his iPad to produce shows and often professes how enjoyable, relaxed and personal it can be, particularly when contrasted with sitting at a desk in front of a Mac. As my main site is called Lounge Ruminator, it is appropriate and very enjoyable for me to sit on the lounge when writing and also producing my audio content.
Although Wavelength and Ferrite Recording Studio are neither expensive nor exclusive, I have become increasingly aware of my privilege of knowing about these apps. Discovering Wavelength depended on being a paid member of an ad-free blogging platform such as Micro.blog; becoming a habitual user of Ferrite was a result of being a member of the art platform and recursive technopublic of open tech podcasting (Goriunova, 2012). Podcasting may have low barriers to entry, but having access to these products that make spoken-word production so much easier has been the result of being a stereotypical white male in a tech-podcast fandom.
All of these learning experiences, particularly my communication on Micro.blog and my public podcasting on Lounge Ruminator led me to meet Andrew Canion and Jason Burk, with whom I now co-host and -produce the ‘tech-adjacent’ podcast Hemispheric Views, using the platform Fireside for hosting and distribution through RSS. Andrew, Jason and listeners of the show are included as a case study in my project, and in the process of making Hemispheric Views, which has now been running for six years, I gained yet more experience to start further podcasts: one for my employer, titled Voices of BlueScope; an audio-only podcast that explores the visual medium of photography like a commentary track, titled 3x2 Photocast; and most importantly for this study, Really Specific Stories, which is the full archive of recorded narrative interviews that accompanies my written thesis.
All of these experiences with different creative tools and hosts for podcasting and blogging have accumulated to form my own experience as a creative audio producer, self-organising and collaborating with others to create a own research microcosm at Really Specific Stories. The process contributes to the broader art platform and anti-environmental biases that constitute open, RSS-based tech podcasting (Goriunova, 2012) (McLuhan and Fiore_,_ 1967). The collaborative podcasting process that has underpinned my process was inspired by the work of Day et al. (2017).
Becoming More Critical
Undertaking this part-time PhD research for seven years and now nearing the end, I remain committed to my research and enthusiastic about the narrative potential of open, RSS-based tech podcasts; however, I have changed in some key ways, as a result of developments both within and beyond my project. So far, I have included some key moments in which I became more reflexive and aware, such as my enhanced understanding of the role of interface, with regard to apps such as Overcast and NetNewsWire. To conclude this autoethnographic exploration of my own research background and positioning, I now integrate a teaser for my more direct use of narrative epiphanies as a methodological approach in my thesis, which display a ‘moment of revelation in a life’ (Denzin, 2014, p. 15). As Denzin (2001, p. 145) explains, there are four types of epiphany:
First are those moments that are major and touch every part of the fabric of a person’s life. Their effects are immediate and long-term. Second are those epiphanies that represent eruptions, or reactions to events that have been going on for a long period of time. Third are those events that are minor yet symbolically representative of major problematic moments in a relationship. Fourth, and finally, are those episodes whose effects are immediate, but to which the individuals involved attach meanings only later, in retrospection and in the reliving of the events. I call these four structures of problematic experience, respectively, the major epiphany; the cumulative epiphany; the illuminative, minor epiphany; and the relived epiphany.
My first epiphany was an illuminative one, as I worked on the Voices of BlueScope podcast. I was grateful to have been asked to produce the show for the company, featuring narratives of employees and connected community and partner organisations around the world. A few years into the narrative podcast project, I learnt that the company website that hosted the audio was to be shut down, with all content to be migrated to a new platform that did not support RSS.I was told by a team of external consultants that ‘RSS was unnecessary’ and that I could just move the audio to the new platform, therefore breaking the open infrastructure and connections with all existing podcast apps and directories. It was at that point that I realised the true nature of my work as a kind of hacker with a corporate, vectoralist environment (Wark, 2004), and that my expertise in podcast production and RSS was being dismissed as unnecessary in a world of platformisation (Bonini, 2022). If I wanted the archive of participants’ narratives to remain open, portable and accessible, I needed to defy the corporate preference and find an alternative, which ultimately was the RSS-based podcasting service, Buzzsprout. At the time, it offered comprehensive migration of the entire audio archive and RSS feed, while maintaining all existing connections with podcast apps and directories.
Later, I experienced a major epiphany while writing a chapter submission titled ‘“It’s in the Show Notes”: Autoethnography of an Amateur Tech Podcaster’ for the edited book Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory (Beckstead and Llinares, 2025), in which I detailed my journey as a practising PhD podcaster. Here, I offer an example of an embedded vignette about the epiphany (from the end of my chapter, under ‘Epilogue: a Glitch Behind the Scenes’ (Feld, 2025, pp. 35–36):
In 2023, well after I first drafted this chapter and as my work on the Really Specific Stories podcast began, my ability to publish regularly on Lounge Ruminator and Feld Notes diminished significantly. When the time came to renew my WordPress plan for Lounge Ruminator, I decided to downgrade it, keeping all of my blog posts and updates, but removing unnecessary plug-ins. After following the process correctly, somehow the downgrade severed my RSS feed’s connection to podcast directories and changed all of my content URLs; this led me to confront a lengthy repair process and to request help from different podcast app providers.
As I went on to explain in the chapter, this technical challenge led me to reflect on my own assumptions of data ownership and openness in the world of open, RSS-based tech podcasting. I began to question if I was really in control of my creative work: even if it was portable, was it technically owned by someone else? The epiphany led to a reversal of my (unknowing) acceptance of hypermaterialisation (Taffel, 2016), as the once invisible infrastructure of WordPress became visible and encouraged me to include a more explicit discussion of the materiality of podcasting in this study.
The third and final epiphany for this autoethnographic section is a cumulative one, which refers to the steady creep of social and mental health effects that I have experienced personally in this course of my research. Despite wonderful support and guidance from my family, academic supervisors, collaborating podcast friends and even managers at work, it would be ridiculous to omit the fact that undertaking a part-time PhD project has been very stressful. Since starting the project, my wife and I have had two children and I have taken on more responsibility at work and in my connected projects—mainly Hemispheric Views and Voices of BlueScope. Such things have eaten into my dwindling personal time and made it more difficult to focus on and complete this written thesis. On one particular occasion in 2024, when I was at the University of Wollongong Library to start writing my discussion chapter, I felt ill-prepared and had an emotional breakdown, calling my wife hopelessly for advice about what to do from a contained phone booth. I share this without embarrassment, as I believe it is important to be transparent and authentic in this project, which Llinares (2018) and Spinelli and Dann (2019) assert is crucial to establishing a sense of trust in podcasting and connected projects.
Over time, these cumulative feelings aligned with what Mills et al. (2024) describe as some of the demographic, occupational, psychological, social, and relational determinants of poor mental health among PhD students in Australia. Although I felt (and still am) passionate about my topic, I frequently experienced psychological determinants such as imposter thoughts and perfectionism discrepancy, occupational determinants in balancing my workload and even social determinants such as loneliness. Although I am frequently surrounded and supported by family and am fortunate to have an entire online community of collaborators—such as Hemispheric Views co-hosts Andrew Canion and Jason Burk, along with our listeners—not to mention encouraging colleagues, this epiphany revealed to me how little time I actually have in person with friends who have nothing to with podcasting. I value my online communication and friendships, but I realised gradually that I had submitted myself to McLuhan’s synaesthesia, as explained by MacDougall (2011). I was, in fact, depriving myself socially as I funnelled my all of my creative hobbies, paid work and educational experience through the medium of podcasting, whilst also losing any time to even listen to podcasts. I had been motivated by the ideals of produsage and participatory culture, but I had turned myself into a blogipelago (Markman, 2012) (Brun, 2008, in Markman and Sawyer, 2014) (Dean, 2010). Despite my intention to engage in what Rushkoff (2016) calls the ‘sustainable prosperity’ of digital distributism, over time, it has increasingly felt that my creative practice in podcasting has become unsustainable. My family is always my focus, and therefore, podcasting and associated activities are pushed into a limited corner of my life. I persist with it as a hobby and professional pursuit and still genuinely enjoy and want to do it; however, I would be lying if I were to claim there has been no emotional or mental toll.
When I began my research project, I was purely enthusiastic and idealistic about the power of open tech podcasting as a form of platform resistance. As I near completion of the project, I remain committed but am far more critical. Thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy autoethnographic account, and if you have ever listened to an episode of Really Specific Stories or any of my other shared projects, I really appreciate it. Thank you for contributing to the experience of the open Web.
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