Reply All is hosted by two people, PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman. This podcast covers “true, surprising, funny, and weird stories” pertaining to real life situations and events. Additionally, an overlying theme seems to be technology/internet and how we effect it, and in turn how it effects us. Most of their podcast episodes vary in length from around 20 minutes to just over 1 hour. However as I was looking for an episode to listen to, I found there are some short ones under 5 minutes long. In my first discussion post, I will be analyzing the third episode from Reply All’s first season. This episode is titled “We Know What You Did”.
The episode starts with PJ Vogt introducing the main character to our story, Ethan Zuckerman. There is no music, which in my opinion adds a feeling of suspense and seriousness. This is a great tool to draw the listener in. The beginning of Ethan Zuckermans downfall was the creation of a webhosting site called Tripod. Here, people could make their very own websites with ease. This went extremely viral and costed him over $100,000 (in contrast, the prior months bill was only $5,000) by his internet provider since they were not running ads on the site at the time. He then decided it would be necessary to get funding from advertising. Everything had been sailing smoothly until a huge car company had one complaint.
Ethan and his boss were set in a meeting with the higher-ups at Ford, who were very angry that their ads were showing up on explicit websites; namely gay porn pages. To gain advertisement income without directly associating the site page with the ad, Ethan then decided to make “a small ad: a little 200×200 pixel that pops up beside the user homepage”. This was the creation of the dreaded pop up ad.
“I really did not mean to break the internet” Ethan says, which he follows with saying that this is an irreversible mistake. Ethan then tried to reveal himself to apologize for the mistake with a “4,200 word think piece”, which was later edited by the Atlantic to a 300 word piece and suddenly went viral to every facet of media. He began getting death threats and was accused of “ruining the internet”. However Ethan thinks that the pop up ads are not really the danger of the internet. The problem is the “surveillance and spying” that we have become so overly comfortable with. Everything we look up on the worldwide web is tracked and our data is sold and passed around. Thus, the danger is not pop up ads unless directly interacting with a potentially dangerous link. The thing he is guilty for is essentially “creating a world” where data tracking is possible as the amount of pop up ads slowly diminish and are replaced fully with surveillance and the selling of our data. This is unable to be controlled and is hard to say how safe our livelihood will be on the internet 30 years from now. Surely we will not have the safety of nearly 30 years ago before the creation of Tripod.
Going back to before I listened to this podcast episode (specifically while doing a bit of research on what I wanted to listen to) I was looking for something with an intriguing storyline, relative to real life, and easy to listen to. Reply All seemed to check all these boxes, so I went on a mission to find my first episode. Additionally When I found out there were two hosts for Reply All, my interest in this podcast piqued. I will admit I don’t listen to many podcasts, but the few that I do listen to are primarily commentary or comedies hosted by two or more people, or have one host and feature guests. One thing that I have noticed with having more than one person in a podcast is that it doesn’t feel like you’re being talked at with no time to process the information you’ve been told, but rather it feels like listening in on a conversation which feels much more casual and relaxed with time to think about the “meat” of the story since there is usually some discourse between the hosts (or the host and guest).
My final note: this podcast featured almost no music except for in between breaks and during ads, which I was actually a bit surprised about. I expected music to be playing softly in the background, however I understand why they didn’t and I think the reason is very clever. I feel like most storytelling style podcasts feature music to match with the theme of the story, however when it is conversation style there is no music to create a more raw and real feeling. I did appreciate this, as it helped me feel more like I was a part of the conversation and felt more engaged. To conclude this post, I really enjoyed my first podcast from Reply All, and look forward to listening to more episodes.
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