From Need to Action: Scenario-Based Listening among Podcast Users

Abstract

Podcasting, as an emerging practice of auditory culture, has created a media space distinct from both traditional broadcasting and visually dominated digital media. While radio historically organized listening around the authority of presenters and relatively fixed modes of sonic communication, contemporary digital media have increasingly structured media use through visual logics. Podcasting introduces another possibility: it reshapes the centralized organization of auditory attention and provides new spaces for individual expression and the formation of listening subjectivities.

This study examines scenario-based listening among podcast users, focusing on how user needs are translated into listening practices within specific contexts of everyday life. Drawing on in-depth interviews and grounded theory, the study analyzes users’ listening needs, situational contexts, behavioral motivations, and modes of interaction, and develops a model of the factors influencing scenario-based podcast use. The study argues that the technological conditions, content forms, and interactive relations of podcasting correspond to the construction, interaction, and connection of listening scenarios. Podcasting extends subjective experience into embodied listening while acquiring broader cultural and social significance through its adaptability to contexts such as commuting, solitude, exercise, and other everyday activities, as well as through the affective and social connections enabled by sound. Through scenario-based listening, users access information, negotiate emotions, and establish connections within everyday life, producing diverse spaces of sonic experience and participating in the formation of an emerging auditory culture.