Intimate listening : exploring audience's podcast experiences through the case of Ångestpodden

Sammanfattning: Anxiety is increasingly present in contemporary media cultures. In Sweden, Ångestpodden, freely translated as “The Anxiety Podcast”, can be seen as a part of this development. Ångestpodden is the focus of this thesis, which sees the podcast as an interesting case for investigating how anxiety saturates contemporary media experiences. The aim of this study is to investigate the podcast listening experience as it is lived by the podcast listeners. The listener's experiences are treated as engagement of media audiences, specifically examining the affective and emotional aspects of podcast listening. Of particular focus in the investigation is the intimacy of the podcast experience. The discussion of this study also seeks to provide more general insights into the podcast genre. For these purposes, the study uses a qualitative approach to analyze the audience members’ own meaning-making of their experiences. The main empirical material is generated with audience interviews and they are complemented with additional findings of sensory-ethnographic observations. The findings of this study show that listening to Ångestpodden is a meaningful experience to its audience. It enhances the listeners’ sense of empowerment as human beings and citizens, and their mixed motivations for listening emphasize a drive for knowledge, a sense of solidarity, and longing for belonging. The listeners’ engagement is characterized by intimacy. The study shows that the podcast talk creates a sense of human proximity and connectivity through affective engagement, enhanced with the emotional, personal podcast storytelling. This study also argues that the podcast experience is, however, not only created by the podcast talk and storytelling, but also by the active audiences who craft their own listening practices and routines in different places and spaces of listening. Furthermore, the craft of the podcast experience connects the listeners to the ordinary and extraordinary, and in these experiences, anxiety becomes something shared, connective, and understandable.