Empathy Machines identifies This American Life as a 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.
The book explores sound studies, and podcasting more specifically, through the lens of “empathy” and a kind of affective feeling that can be seen in the history of radio, and focusing specifically on the centrality of This American Life (TAL) as a focal point. It presents important contributions, perhaps the most central of which is the first book on TAL and its importance in the history of both radio and podcasting. It contextualizes TAL 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 1960’s and the “Great Society Liberalism” that guided its programming and approach to the audience.
Introduction: “Empathy Machines” Chapter 1: A Feeling Medium Brief History of Radio’s Symbiotic Relationship to Crisis Radio as a Feeling Medium The Car-Radio Assemblage NPR’s Purposes: “Listeners Should Feel” Driveway Moments: Affect and Programming Chapter 2: Feeling Playful This American Life, Narrative Enchantment, and Empathy The Magic of Strangers in TAL The Alchemy of Gothic Families in TAL Narrative Enchantment and Bathos in TAL Chapter 3: Feeling American The Vexed “Public” of Public Radio Empathy as Inclusion in Liberal Democracy Empathy and National Belonging after September 11 Empathy as Method: From NPR to “The Podcast Space.” Chapter 4: Fellow Feeling Sounding Liberal: Public Radio and Women’s Voices This American Life and Dramas of Masculinity Podcasting’s “Reckoning” with Gender Discrimination Chapter 5: Feeling Uncomfortable Making Scenes: Moments of Public Failure on Serial Podcasting’s Reckonings with Racism Other Reckonings Conclusion: Feeling Different New Voices, New Podcast Cultures Solidarity Over Empathy Crafting, Gaming, and Identity-Based Podcast Communities NPR and TAL’s Adoption of Solidarity Over Empathy Index
Jason Loviglio is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), USA. He is the founding chair of the Media and Communication Studies Department at UMBC, and he is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion of Radio and Podcast Studies (2022) and Radio Journal: Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media (2017 - present).
Reviews for Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling
In the first book-length analysis of This American Life, Loviglio explores how this innovative and influential public radio program has carved out a space of affect and empathy in an increasingly fractured, individualistic world. * John L. Sullivan, Professor of Media and Communication, Muhlenberg College, USA *
