Spark is presented
as a CBC Radio show without a time slot, without time limitations,
dealing in technology topics that are not entirely sensitive to time.
It’s
tethered to a 27-minute time slot (Wednesday 11:30am and Saturday 4pm
via 99.1 FM), which is also a succinctly satisfying length for a
podcast, even if the torrent of Web 2.0 buzzwords explained by host Nora Young will likely sound like an antiquated novelty should anyone dust off the archives a few years from now.
Such
is the risk when one actually puts these new tools into practice,
rather than just blogging about how fantabulous they are and
complaining that corporate channels are too stodgy to ever understand —
the “They Don’t Get It” school of media criticism.
But who
actually wants broadcasting designed by citizen committee? Despite
thrumming along just fine since September, an episode earlier this
month invited Spark listeners to collaborate on a script via public Wiki.
The result sounded like more labour for the creators, and less
creativity to savour — even though this is the kind of gimmick to get
people chatting about how the CBC “gets it” after all.
“We
wanted to try being transparent about the process,” says Young. “It’s
not like we expected half the listeners would take the time to make
changes. And, for a segment of the audience, it was a chance to learn
how a show is put together.”
Mercifully, the process didn’t mirror the June 2005 effort by the Los Angeles Times to create a “Wikitorial” — shut down within three days when the vandals took over. (This was inevitably covered on Spark’s Wiki show.) Spark
is too polite a program to generate such dissent: the show’s sharper
edge is mostly achieved through audio collage, bridging segments and
providing a coherent cohesion.
“What does Facebook sound
like?” was a question Young was forced to ask herself last summer when
conceiving a populist CBC show that harnessed social media trends du
jour. “I find the rabbit holes of the online world fascinating. But
it’s a constant battle against information overload. I’ve got Facebook
fatigue now — at some point it becomes, 'No, I don’t want to download
another zombie application.' All that minutiae isn’t worth my time.
With access to so many arcane details, at what point do we lose our
sense of coherence and perspective?”
Case in point, Young tells
of being invited to a recent fondue party — clearly, leisure time
activities for CBC Radio types haven’t changed since their studios were
in Cabbagetown — where guests dressed in '70s cross-country skiwear,
while the entire process from the invitation to the hangovers
transpired online.
“For some people, it was as if the event
didn’t conclude until the photos were shared,” she says. “The virtual
documentation and actual experience were part of the same thing. That’s
something I admit to not entirely understanding myself.”
Don’t snapshots of people you personally love or hate mugging for the camera prompt more morbid curiosity than a road map
of the 1964 World’s Fair? “I’d rather look at the 1964 World’s Fair,”
says Young. “But I’m drawn to stuff that serves a curatorial function.
If there’s a weird thing that someone just found, it helps if you can
see it as more than idiosyncratic, but part of something larger.”
Listening via podcast liberates Spark
from certain limitations of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
though — the 2005 lockout stirred up plenty of the aforementioned “They
Don’t Get It” rhetoric, and the desire to harness CBC Radio One’s
ratings momentum into content that could be a bit less 20th century.
Young had eight years of hosting precious pop-cult Saturday standard Definitely Not the Opera behind her, and in subsequent freelance mode started The Sniffer in 2005 — twice-weekly bites of tech-happy chat with another CBC regular, Cathi Bond,
that was part of a soon-aborted national podcast network designed to
take advantage of the irrational exuberance surrounding the delivery
medium. The Sniffer is still a going concern, though, and the effort helped legitimize Spark.
Plus,
public radio came out the big winner in the podcasting sweepstakes,
since nuanced non-commercial broadcasting proved ideal for time-shifted
portable listening. The idea that advertisers would flock to homemade
spoken word, not so much, even if the notion that most of the audience
are coveting the spotlight for themselves has only bolstered the
condescending stance of most big media.
“There’s still a
problem of arrogance in large measure,” says Young. “The lines are
blurring a bit more. Yet, I concur with what Andrew Keen writes about in The Cult of the Amateur
— will there still be any budgets left for an investigative journalist
to go somewhere? Or, is it just going to be a bunch of reporters
chasing one other’s tail, writing about what the other ones wrote about
Britney Spears.”
The ideal episode of Spark is likely
the one debuting this week: a doctor gives two people a list of
symptoms and they, along with listeners participating in the comments
section, are challenged to diagnose
themselves through online resources. Homespun radio fodder, with a
subtext that geriatric CBC listeners can appreciate, that can be neatly
packaged in a storytelling format. It’s not unlike a New York public
radio project
where listeners were asked to submit their corner store’s price of
milk, beer and lettuce in order to determine who was being most gouged.
There’s
lots of participatory process, but spare the expectation that anyone
wants to do their own forensic accounting of whatever led to the final
outcome. Young counters that there is an “appetite for transparency”
out there among listeners.
Spark debuted concurrently with another CBC Radio One show, Search Engine,
which applies a similar distribution model through a Thursday-morning
timeslot, podcast and website. While that show sputtered out of the
gate, as host Jesse Brown feigned sensationalism over
topics like videogames in China, the program found its voice through
old-school talk-radio conflict: railing against proposed copyright
laws, baiting masked anti-Scientology protesters and, last week, a dialogue between notoriously anonymous CBC blogger “Ouimet” and the new CBC president and CEO, Hubert T. Lacroix.
Search Engine
is more aggressively operating in a juvenile universe where your own
privacy is always portrayed as under threat, yet no elected official —
or overly opinionated online lout — is absolved from being hung out for
public humiliation.
It’s made for an interesting dynamic: one
show that’s part of the problem, and another that’s part of the
solution, and the CBC can only benefit from trying both.
“Will
it turn out, a few years from now that we’re coming off like dad trying
to look cool at the kids’ party?” wonders Young. “That’s the fear. But
it’s also the nature of doing something in the moment.”
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