Last week I gave an hour-long talk to a local group of professionals. I enjoyed myself a lot and received some nice emails in return. One of them, sent to me by Anne Jones was partciularly insightful. I’ve included most of the email here (with the writer’s permission):

I was especially interested in the question you cited from your wife, which was something like, “Why would I want to listen to a podcast?” and in its corollary question that was posed later by someone in the audience, which was something like “Why would I want to choose to present information about my product or service through a podcast?” Those questions got me to thinking about the history and nature of human communication and learning, and I had the following thoughts (I’m no anthropologist, but maybe some of my amateur views still are valid):

In ancient times, human beings probably learned through demonstrations and pictographs. Soon human beings developed spoken language, and for a number of eons, human beings most likely spread learning by telling stories. Eventually written languages were developed, and the oral traditions of teaching were augmented by written materials. However, at first, the materials required for writing were scarce and expensive, and only a few experts were able to create written records. A few more eras later, along came Gutenburg to invent the printing press, and suddenly, written learning was available to a much wider audience. This remained the situation for a few more hundred years. All during this time, the visual learning from written language became more widely available, but audial learning was still limited to one’s own tribe. Finally, in the Industrial Age, the telephone came along, followed soon after by television. These inventions began to magnify the potential for audial learning, but the media for distribution was still pretty limited (much like the hand-enscribed texts written by monks in the days before the printing press). Now that computers and the internet have finally expanded to the point that they are affordable by a fairly large population, we may now be able return to the days of greater audial learning, just like in the early tribal days, only now our tribes can be of our own choosing, rather than restricted to the ones we were born into. As I meditate on these thoughts, I think it’s quite possible that audial learning from human to human may very likely be a much richer learning experience than the textual experience in which one human writes text that is read from the impersonal medium of paper or computer screen by another human. This is probably the reason that traditional colleges and universities are still widely attended even though e-learning is fairly readily available. There are many mysteries of the human mind yet to be discovered!

In addition, of course, is the obvious fact that we can learn from listening to a podcast while we are multi-tasking at other more physical tasks, such as driving a car or scouring the bathtub, but it’s pretty hard to try to read while we’re doing those tasks!