Way of Life, "The Ultimate Habit Building App"

On New Year’s Day, instead of signing up for a gym or joining a writing group, I binge downloaded apps on my iPad. Perhaps it was the grease hangover from a night of eating only chicken wings in a comedy club upstairs from a Chinese restaurant, or perhaps it was the usual grad student anxiety made worse by habitual procrastination to Academic Coach Taylor memes. Whatever the cause of my guilt, my answer was in the App Store. So, I downloaded a bunch of apps: one to count calories, another to create ambient music in order work better, harder, and faster, and another to figure out what mental roadblocks weigh me down, in order to – as the app urges – “live better every day.” To top it off, I bought a habit building app that reminds me to record whether I counted my calories, whether I worked harder, better, and faster, and whether I overcame those mental roadblocks. The app charts my progress over time and shares it with my social networks.

This remedy is one part Lifehacker’s cult of productivity, half part Anthony Robbin’s self-help-ism, and two parts Kevin Kelly’s Quantified Self. And like eating fried chicken in the dark, this remedy instantly gratifies but never quite satisfies. Like other purported technological cure-alls today, this one is identified through a neologism, is criticized as a buzzword, and is hailed by proponents as a movement. “Gamification” is this process of using game logics such as points, badges, levels, challenges, and rewards to enhance traditionally non-game experiences. This experience might be uploading your fitness milestones onto Nike+  and syncing it with your workout on the Xbox 360 Kinect; it may be boosting productivity at a call center by using leaderboards and badges; it may be competing with your roommate for tangible rewards using a sophisticated system of rules to more pleasantly accomplish household chores. It is the carrot and the stick; it is putting more life into your life.

Nike+ Kinect Training

In all these examples, there is a representational structure linking reward to achievement, cause to effect – a structure that gamification enthusiasts claim produces unprecedented behavior change. Gamification allows you to incentivize anything in your (or your employees’) life to make it more fun, more efficient, more effective. In the words of Jane McGonigal – the movement’s high priestess who galvanized a legion of marketers and game designers in that TED talk – games can make a better world and make us “SuperBetter”™ – incidentally, also the name of her latest game.

At MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Conference, a panel of gaming experts playfully refused to respond to a persistent question rising to the top of a crowdsourced backchannel – “What is the future of Gamification?” Dismissed by these experts as a a fancy name for customer loyalty programs that are a perversion of game mechanics, and disdained as “marketing bullshit,” it is easy to write off gamification as the latest marketing buzzword. However, as media scholars have witnessed in half a decade of critical deconstruction of what was known as “Web 2.0,” technological buzzwords are never empty – they are ciphers for configurations of cultural values that iteratively shape relations between people, systems, and institutions.

The gamified website for NBC's The Office

On The Office’s gamified website, users signed up as employees of the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company and earned “Schrute Bucks” for making comments, posting photos and performing tasks that built engagement and buzz for the show. It didn’t take long for the site to be populated with user-generated content. In an interview with Mashable, the gamification startup Bunchball raved that “NBC loved it because they were paying all these users fake money to do real work.” Unlike the conception of pure waste that game scholars such as Roger Caillois have used to define play, the playfulness of gamification is consummately productive.

According to the Pew center’s survey of experts, gamification may retreat as a fad, but only because its mechanisms will become more entrenched and quotidian – a trajectory that Web 2.0 took in becoming simply “social media.” Therefore, despite the fatigue from yet another marketing revolution, media scholars must map the contours of Gamification’s discourses as they erect and legitimate motivational structures for narrowly predetermined behaviors in our work, leisure, and psychic lives. These are structures that capture our playfulness, our guilt, our desires, our energies, and convert them into quantifiable outcomes such as engagement in platforms, loyalty to brands, user-generated data, and user-generated content. In Blade Runner (1982), the visionary doctor proclaimed that “commerce is our goal here at Tyrell; more human than human is our motto.” And as the film has taught three decades of moviegoers, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be human. Similarly, as we reinvent our lives through gamification, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be alive.

from zoomar's flickr page, under a creative commons license

The new media sheen has worn off of podcasting. At the height of its trendiness, “podcast” was selected as the word of the year in the New Oxford American Dictionary (2005), and academics like Richard Berry or yours truly (along with a rowdy band of co-authors) were trying to think about what this new creative audio practice meant for our understanding of both traditional broadcast radio and new media more generally. Fast forward to 2012 and podcasts are no longer the novelty they once were. They are not solely an audio affair either, since video podcasts seem to have joined vlogs and webisodes as names that apply to short, serialized video instalments. Many corporate and public broadcasters now offer their most popular shows via podcast, in addition to their regular radio programs. Podcasting has its own celebrity star system that overlaps with other fields of media stardom. Many podcasts are available for free, though some of them require a subscription or other forms of payment. There are still, of course, armies of independent DIY podcasters out there with their handheld mics and home studios, toiling away out of pure passion (and usually, in relative obscurity), but these co-exist with rather than replace or threaten traditional broadcasting practices and infrastructure.

Despite their seamless incorporation into the traditional broadcasting landscape, podcasts are still tricky objects of media analysis, since they can refer to the thing you listen to (i.e. the actual audio show itself), the way in which it was made (i.e. in someone’s basement, garage, or semi-professional studio), the means by which you receive it (i.e. usually through a podcast aggregating RSS feed, your media player, or directly from a podcasting app), or where you play it (i.e. commuting, at the gym) and through which device (usually an mp3 player, or a computer). Podcasts are related formally to radio (and in the case of video podcasts, television), though the degree of relatedness varies greatly depending on the program. They are also highly bound up in urban life and the creation of personal soundscapes, as Michael Bull’s work on portable music players suggests. While our media have always had their own rituals, with podcasts our rituals can have their own media.

Given these multiple meanings, podcasts might better fall under Jonathan Sterne’s recent definition of format. The term format, he argues, encourages us to separate our conceptions of media from their manifestations (i.e. TV from televisions, Radio from radios, Telephony from telephones), to help us think about media experiences in light of convergence and the dilution of individual media across various screens and devices. Borrowing from Lisa Gitelman, Sterne reminds us that “the mediality of the medium lies not simply in the hardware, but in its articulation with particular practices, ways of doing things, institutions and even in some cases belief systems.” Format thus becomes a potentially useful concept for exploring the meeting point of aesthetics, storage, transmission, and display.

And this is what still remains exciting about podcasting, at least when we look beyond the top podcasts lists on iTunes and the podcasts that are simply direct re-packagings of already existing broadcast programs: the format has prompted a reconsideration of what we can expect from radio. I mean this both in the consumer-ly sense of vast amounts of content, more flexible delivery, and greater portability, and also in a producer-ly sense. The practice of podcasting has, like college radio stations, become a training ground for cultural enthusiasts to experiment with technology, performance, and audience/relationship building. Even though there is no .pod file specification (podcasts come as MP3s, AACs, M4vs, OGGs, etc.), podcasts contribute to a re-formatting of broadcasting to a practice that is far more accessible and generative for everyday users than it has previously been.

I realize these last few points beg further explanation, but since I’m already running long on words, I’ll save it for a follow-up post. There, I’ll focus on a few specific podcasts and work through some of their most salient features.