Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting, and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling
Jan 2026 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Ebook
352
Pages
About this ebook
The first book-length treatment of This American Life, Empathy Machines contextualizes the influential show 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 1960s and the “Great Society Liberalism” that guided its programming and approach to the audience.
Empathy Machines identifies This American Life as a central 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.
Empathy Machines identifies This American Life as a central 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 first book-length treatment of This American Life, Empathy Machines contextualizes the influential show 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 1960s and the “Great Society Liber...
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About the author
Jason Loviglio is 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).
Jason Loviglio is 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) an...
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