Today on “Conversations” we discussed the emotional impact of Serial’s Episode 9: “To Be Suspected” along with white privilege and gender bias. See Rabia’s post…
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Today on “Conversations” we discussed the emotional impact of Serial’s Episode 9: “To Be Suspected” along with white privilege and gender bias. See Rabia’s post…
Serial is more than halfway complete at this point. I’ve waited until now to focus on one of the three most central topics for my study of the podcast: ethics. It is a happy coincidence that our guest on today’s Hangout is Adam Bonnifield (/u/quickredditaccount), one of the four moderators of the Serial subreddit; Reddit serves as a massive laboratory for media ethics because users operate without journalists’ professional boundaries.
My conversation with Rabia Chaudry and special guest Adam Bonnifield today:
My weekly discussion “Conversations on the Serial Podcast” with Rabia Chaudry will happen Mon, Nov. 17, at 2pm EST instead of 1pm EST. You can watch…
The episodes of Serial continue to get crunchy with metanarrative detail. By that I mean that the podcast serves as a catalyst for other narrative strands. Reddit, Twitter, WordPress, Split the Moon (Rabia Chaudry’s blog), and Slate’s “Serial Spoiler Special” podcast (begun the same week that our Conversations did), along with dozens of media reviews of the the project — all of these provide regular outlets for dynamic discussion. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel that sends you off to systems of other novels, Serial inspires further reflection and creation. Consider how “How People Obsess Over Serial” by Sal Gentile and John Purcell, could be viewed as a comedic attempt to probe the same issue I’m exploring in a much more eggheaded way — metanarrative.
In my conversation with Rabia today, we discussed Serial’s latest episode, “The Case Against Adnan Syed” and Rabia’s post last week “The Worst of It.”
Discussion of Serial at this point mainly focuses on Adnan’s guilt or innocence, and, while I’m just as interested in this as anyone else getting up early on Thursday morning to download the podcast, my focus here is to explore the narrative rather than the case. I’ll start with unpacking a word that I used early in my discussions with Rabia and then backed away from: metanarrative. It keeps springing up, so here is some background.
For an overview of my project, see “Conversations on the Serial Podcast: Beginnings.” These conversations are an exploration of the aspects of new media engagement which affect narrative and knowledge. Rabia Chaudry and I will be discussing each subsequent episode of Serial in a live Google Hangout every Monday at 1pmEST. Feel free to use the hashtag #serialnarrative to send questions or comments before, during, or after each conversation.
The Serial podcast has taken over my attention in the last several weeks.
I’ve been fascinated by the personal, rhetorical, and digital components of this story: the difference between Sarah Koenig’s and Rabia Chaudry’s motivations, their personal attachments (and professional attempts at detachment) to the case, the engagement of online communities around the story (specifically on Twitter, Reddit, and the Serial web portal), and the story’s intersection with my own professional and personal identity. I am a professor of English in the Digital Writing and New Media department at Southern Polytechnic State University, teaching classes and researching how digital environments affect how we teach, write, and learn. Also because my closest friend since 1992 is named Adnan; his family is also from Pakistan. So, yeah, I’m hooked on Serial.
By: Pete (@allistelling) and Anna (@anna_phd). The following is a quick-fired dispatch from the outer bank regions of the zombie horde (i.e. from In the spirit…
There is an clear tension between individual publishing (like on a blog) and communal publishing (like on a forum, Facebook page, or some other commenting…
By the close of last week’s Domain Incubator, I was full of ideas. I will attempt, over the next couple of posts to break these into…
