Welcome back listeners: locating nostalgia, domesticity and shared listening practices in Contemporary horror podcasting. Danielle Hancock (BA, MA) The University of East Anglia School of American Media and Arts A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2018 Contents Acknowledgements Page 2 Introduction: Why Podcasts, Why Horror, and Why Now? Pages 3-29 Section One: Remediating the Horror Podcast Pages 49-88 Case Study Part One Pages 89 -99 Section Two: The Evolution and Revival of the Audio-Horror Host. Pages 100-138 Case Study Part Two Pages 139-148 Section Three: From Imagination to Enactment: Digital Community and Collaboration in Horror Podcast Audience Cultures Pages 149-167 Case Study Part Three Pages 168-183 Section Four: Audience Presence, Collaboration and Community in Horror Podcast Theatre. Pages 184-201 Case Study Part Four Pages 202-217 Conclusion: Considering the Past and Future of Horror Podcasting Pages 218-225 Works Cited Pages 226-236 1 Acknowledgements With many thanks to Professors Richard Hand and Mark Jancovich, for their wisdom, patience and kindness in supervising this project, and to the University of East Anglia for their generous funding of this project. 2 Introduction: Why Podcasts, Why Horror, and Why Now? The origin of this thesis is, like many others before it, born from a sense of disjuncture between what I heard about something, and what I experienced of it. The ‘something’ in question is what is increasingly, and I believe somewhat erroneously, termed as ‘new audio culture’. By this I refer to all scholarly and popular talk and activity concerning iPods, MP3s, headphones, and podcasts: everything which we may understand as being tethered to an older history of audio-media, yet which is more often defined almost exclusively by its digital parameters. Within this definition lies a dominant narrative, both popular and academic, which ties the digital to the anti-social. From the popularisation of the MP3 player (and in particular the iPod) onwards, digital or ‘new’ audio culture and technology has been more and more vociferously associated with the breakdown of shared social spirit, and a silencing of (assumedly) previously vibrantly social public and private spaces (Phagura, 2004; Mason, 2006; Bull, 2007; King, 2009). Certainly, earbuds and MP3s soon began to fascinate both mainstream and academic press, and to populate the cultural imagination with images of isolated, ignorant, socially untethered ‘iPodders’ and iPod ‘zombies’. In popular press, the iPod formed the nexus of moral panics as varied as iPod-prompted muggings, traffic accidents and academic disengagement (as students plugged-in during classes), yet with a clear emphasis on the issue of anti-social, individualistic behaviour (de Castella, 2011; Wattanajantra, 2010). New audio-media is understood as both eliciting, and exemplary of, contemporary breakdowns in traditional societal values. In totality, popular discussion of new audio media has largely aligned developing digital audio technology with a new audio culture which seemingly threatens the very fabric of our society. 3 We might expect a more balanced view from scholarly discussion. Yet, as in its popular press counterparts, scholarly discussion of new audio culture emerges as apparently irreconcilable with collective community values. Headphones, earbuds, play-lists and on-demand listening are repeatedly argued to forge disconnect both from listeners’ surrounding physical world, and from the connective, collective ties of traditional live radio (Wittkower et al, 2008; Levy, 2006; Bull, 2007). A brief example of early academic and ‘mainstream’ dialogues of iPods and earbuds shows both the pessimism concerning new audio culture’s social properties, and the extent to which discussion of it was dominated by externalised, exterior perspectives. Andrew Sullivan’s apocalyptically-titled 'Society is Dead, We Have Retreated into the iWorld' (2005) depicts 'the iPod people': '[t]hey walk down the street in their own MP3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble.' Despite confessing iPod ownership, Sullivan offers a starkly exterior viewpoint on this zombie nation, saying, '[i]t’s strange to be among so many people and hear so little. Except that each one is hearing so much.' (2005) Regina Arnold tells us, '[w]e’re all familiar with the sight of individuals people plugged into iPods; buds sprouting from their ears like wire vines off flesh trellises, locking each individual consciousness into its own private media landscape.' (2008, 205 sic) New social conventions and etiquettes soon arose as the earplug signaled desired social distance: 'in a way it’s saying I’m with you people, but I don’t want to deal with you.' (Wayne Coyne cited in Levy 2006, 123) Indeed for Pitt, the iPod fosters ‘what seems to be the ideal environment for the social solipsist’ (Pitt: 2006, 161). According to Pitt, 'it has turned iPod users into anti-social beings, those who avoid human interaction' (ibid). D. E. Wittkower even wonders the extent to which the audio content truly matters so much as the barrier that the iPod allows between user and Other: ‘Maybe when we listen to our iPods we do so in order to close ourselves off from a world that 4 we find threatening, strange, annoying, exhausting or simply dull’ (2008, xii). New audio media seems to have created a highly visible world of auditory outsiders and insiders, yet in which the insiders are not a collective, exclusive unit but rather are fragmented, distanced, and purposefully so - each happily alone. Such pessimistic critical perspective is based perhaps not so much in new audio media’s facilitation of ‘on-the-go’ headphone listening, or in the iPod sepcifically; prior to the iPod’s release in October 2001, portable MP3 players had already existed for several years, and before that precedent came the Sony Walkman. Rather, such pessimism’s centrality to academic and popular understanding and discussion of new audio culture and media may in fact be understood as a continuation, even fruition, of pre-existing social fears and critical opinions concerning increasing media trends towards individualisation and privatisation. In the last few decades perhaps the most identifiable, technologically-induced phobia of the Western world has been that of individualism gone too far. The development and wide-spread popularisation of portable and personalised digital technologies has produced a sense of rapid alteration in the ways in which we inhabit shared social or public space, bringing fears of social skills and traditional community values being jettisoned and lost in favor of privatised, personalised, entertainment and communications technologies. There may be no better icon for such modern fears than the mobile audio player. Certainly, the earbuds, pre-recorded playlists, mobile devices, and public, urban listening habits associated with new audio media are variously defined as indicative of, or causal to, a decreased sense of local and national community, and heightened desires for privacy, isolation and independence. 5 Such claims are largely defended through comparison of ‘new’ audio media and listening cultures with their ‘old’, or ‘traditional’, counterparts. If traditional radio conjures ideas of intimate liveness and connectivity, community and nation-building, and families sat around the fire-side, then the lone earbud listener navigating urban streets in absolute indifference and ignorance to the voices and sounds ‘outside’ of their personal soundscape cuts a very different figure. iPod users and their ever-present headphones, we are told, ‘banish the contingency of daily life through immersing themselves within their own private utopia in which they do not speak, but listen, silenced and silencing’ (Bull 2007, 68). This is where my issue, and the desired intervention of this project, emerges. Although I do not deny the role of new audio media in allowing privacy and solitude in an increasingly connected and populated world, there are, a number of reasons to dispute the totality of such claims, and in this thesis I seek to provide an alternate understanding of new audio media, and the listening cultures which it apparently enables and encourages, through exploration of Horror fiction podcasting. Horror fiction podcasting frequently evidences a continued preoccupation with, and desire to connect to, older audio media technologies and cultures, in particular (though not exclusively) Golden Era (i.e. 1920s-50s) or ‘Old Time Radio’ (OTR). This is demonstrated through repeated, prominent tropes such as: aesthetic re-mediation of the podcast as older audio technology; re-make, homage and re-imagining of older audio texts and programmes; imaginative audience (re)location to domestic and shared settings; digital community building and co-imagined listening cultures; and revival and evolution of open-studio audio-theatre and in-house ‘radio’ audience. In these features, these programmes indisputably complicate, and arguably refute in totality, the notion of new audio media’s inherent disassociation with traditional audio cultures, and culmination in anti-social, individualistic and ‘anti-traditional’ 6 listening cultures. Through the exploration of horror podcasting’s engagement with older audio technologies and cultures, then, this thesis argues that we may understand numerous, often competing, anxieties, desires and tensions within new audio