FEELING MYSELF: THE RISE OF INTIMACY AS AUTHENTICITY IN ADDRESSING IMAGINED PODCAST LISTENERS

Abstract

This study aims to theorize the parasocial relationships between podcast creators and listeners, but with a unique focus on the perspective of the creators themselves. While parasocial relationships are typically studied from the perspective of the audience, understanding the creator's viewpoint can provide valuable insights into the dynamics of these relationships and the modes of addressivity they evoke, particularly with the emergence of intimacy as a keyword in podcast studies (Swiatek, 2018; Spinelli & Dann, 2019; Euritt, 2020, 2023). Through in-depth interviews with prominent podcasters in the Israeli podcast scene, we explore: How do podcast creators imagine their listeners? How are these imagined listeners shaped by the creators’ personal dispositions, their own experiences as podcast listeners, their assumptions about podcasting as a medium, and their actual interactions with their listeners? We argue that the starting point for the postulated intimacy between podcasters and listeners is an imagined addressee whom the podcaster conceives as similar to themselves. Just as authors imagine their audience as they write novels, we assume that the creator’s imagined audience impacts the actual audience that emerges. We also argue that this addressee is brought into being through a shared understanding of intimacy as authenticity, even though only the notion of intimacy actually implies some form of relationship. In making these arguments, we propose a typology of different kinds of imagined relationships with perceived listeners, contributing to a more complex understanding of podcasting and its cultural meaning.