Full Description
The first book-length treatment of This American Life, Empathy Machines contextualizes the influential show within the history of radio, looking back to radio's golden era and the para-social connections that it encouraged, as well as the formation of NPR in the 1960s and the "Great Society Liberalism" that guided its programming and approach to the audience.
Empathy Machines identifies This American Life as a central cultural institution in the evolution of empathy as a "liberal feeling" central to podcast storytelling and the neoliberal era in which it developed. This American Life revitalized the public radio traditions of investigative journalism and sonically inventive audio production. An early adopter of podcasting as a time-shifted delivery mechanism for its broadcast content, the program also ushered in appointment listening, a key innovation and disruption in the emerging chaotic attention economy of the 21st century. Empathy Machines centers This American Life as a model for prioritizing empathy as an affective and ideological
strategy for feeling liberal as liberal democracy's precarious balance of opposites began to fracture into hypercapitalism, atavistic ethnonationalism, and new identity politics.
Contents
Introduction: "Become Empathy Machines!"
1. A Feeling Medium
2. Voracious Voyagers: NPR Listens
3. Feeling Playful: This American Life and Narrative Enchantment
4. Feeling American: This American Life Goes to War
5. Feeling Flush - Planet Money and The American Dream
6. Fellow Feeling: This American Life and the Gendered Voice
7. Feeling Uncomfortable: The Politics and Aesthetics of Cringe
Conclusion: Maybe It's a Feeling? How This American Life Long Endured
Index
