Attack of the Podcast

Narrowing down a topic for this assignment seems to have been an exercise in hair-pulling and second-guessing for the past two weeks, but I think I've finally made up my mind! Hopefully.

The podcast I've chosen to emulate is the one called Spark. I chose this one from the list because the idea of exploring a technological innovation and its implications/consequences immediately appealed to my love of analysis and narrative. From there, I greatly enjoyed browsing through some of Spark's episodes for their investigative nature, with the tone and methods used to question technological developments, trends and possibilities. Listening to each one led to a great deal of interest and inspiration for my own assigned podcast, and a little research further along cemented my topic for me.

Of the elements that make up Spark, I especially want to capture its investigative nature. I would also be greatly interested in - though admittedly equally intimidated by - the prospect of including brief interviews (from the general public, as well as from an intellect in the field) in order to explore the popular opinion of my topic and its scientific feasibility and benefits/consequences. Overall, I'd very much like to see my finished product emulate Spark's ability to incorporate an exploration of a technology's origins along with its current manifestation. Though, I'd perhaps like to spend a bit more time discussing future possibilities as well (depending on the direction my research ends up taking from here).

The specific topic that I will be creating a show about is the humanoid AI (artificial intelligence), and our bionic present and potential future. In recent years, amazing and even unnerving breakthroughs have been made in the area of creating machines that are able to perform tasks on their own and even learn from their environment and adapt. Further to that, there have been equally stunning breakthroughs in human-technology blending, integrating one with the other for specific tasks, with far-reaching possibilities for future potential enhancements to one's quality of life and even life expectancy. An underlying theme tying it all together will be this kind of technology's depictions in science fiction, leading into interview-source material to progress a debate as to its positive and/or negative ramifications.

For podcasting advice, the Spark site suggested wasn't too much help (assuming I was on the right one), so after some browsing I found a pretty helpful source of tips for subject matter and podcast script writing techniques at this link to the New Mexico State University website: http://aces.nmsu.edu/employee/podcasting/parts-of-a-podcast.html. Another good source for the podcast script writing was at this link, for the CDC website: http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/AudioScriptWritingGuide.pdf. The advice written out on both of the above websites definitely proved helpful in topic selection, with such points as the benefits of picking a topic of personal interest as well as of interest within current events/debates. It also had some very good points to make on the writing style for the podcast, in sentence structures and conversational tones to aim for. To make them even more useful for students in my position, maybe I would add more details on ways to take a topic of interest and narrow it into a conversational topic that may suit the radio station structuring that makes up a podcast.