In this blog post, I seek to explore the relationship—and potential tensions—between the circulation of collective identities and digital technologies and infrastructures. In other words, this post asks: How do digital technologies and infrastructures impact the circulation of specific publics? To fully explore this question, I first establish my theoretical framework by providing a brief overview of Maurice Charland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric and its application to contemporary podcasting practices. Building on Charland’s work, I then offer one particular case study: The Bitter Southerner Podcast. Through analyzing the podcast, I examine how the algorithms and platforms that shape podcasting practices may ultimately undermine its efforts to constitute a progressive Southern public.
In his seminal work “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Charland argues that rhetoricians must understand publics as actively constituted through the act of narration. As Charland explains, “Narratives ‘make real’ coherent subjects. They constitute subjects as they present a particular textual position … as the locus for action and experience” (138-9). In our ever-evolving technological world, podcasting is one digital medium particularly suited for the work of constitutive rhetoric because of its ability to build intimacy between listener and host. As Lukasz Swiatek argues, podcasting functions as an “intimate bridging medium,” or a “means of communication that generates a sense of intimacy” (173) even when participants are not physically proximate to one another.
This sense of intimacy is achieved in a variety of ways. For example, podcast hosts speak directly to their listeners, often in a casual manner, thereby enhancing the perceived bond between listener and host (Adler Berg; Euritt). In addition, Alyn Euritt attends to the haptic nature of podcasting; in particular, she argues that the tendency for listeners to wear earbuds isolates the host’s voice from the disruptions of the exterior world, which allows the podcast to “[work]affectively within the bodies of its listeners” (28). In short, then, I argue that podcasting as a digital medium creates a sense of intimacy between listener and host that reinforces the listener’s sense of belonging within a particular community. In the case of The Bitter Southerner Podcast, listeners are constituted as part of a progressive Southern collective through the intimacy they feel with host Chuck Reece.
On August 6, 2013, Chuck Reece, Dave Whitling, Kyle Tibbs Jones, and Butler Raines launched The Bitter Southerner, a digital magazine intended to combat negative stereotypes about the U.S. South. Five years later, in 2018, The Bitter Southerner Podcast was launched with Reece as its host. The podcast builds on the magazine’s goal, namely, to illuminate “the culture of the South—outside the lines of Southern stereotypes” by featuring “stories about people and organizations who don’t fit the stereotypes” (“The Bitter Southerner”). I argue that Reece utilizes the podcast format to instantiate a progressive Southern public. For instance, Reece relies on the collective pronouns “we” and “our” when addressing the listener, implying the existence of this progressive Southern collective. Furthermore, he cultivates a persona steeped in Southern vernacular. With a voice sporting a clear Southern twang, Reece speaks casually, referring to people as “folks” and using terms like “wanna” in place of “want to.” Through such strategies, Reece discursively constructs a Southern subject—and collective—with which the listener can identify.
Although podcasting offers particular affordances for the constitution and circulation of publics, it behooves us to remember that larger digital infrastructures similarly impact this process. In his work on imagined communities in the digital age, Jake Cowan argues that digital infrastructures can inadvertently undermine the constitutive rhetoric process. In other words, Cowan argues that digital media offers “personalized digital ecologies” (191) that undercut the very formation of uniform masses. The formation of any sort of cohesive identity such as a public becomes increasingly difficult in the wake of the digital revolution, which creates “an (often antagonistic) aggregation of ideological echo chambers unbound by spatial proximity or traditional affiliation” (Cowan 192).
Cowan’s concerns are echoed in recent scholarship on the impact of recommendation algorithms and platforms on podcast listenership. For instance, Debra C. Lopez et al. analyze how podcast listenership is shaped both by recommendation algorithms and recommendations made by the hosts. Similarly, as John Sullivan explains, podcasting is moving from a decentralized format in which storage, discovery, and consumption require different platforms towards fully integrated content platforms run by companies such as Apple and Spotify. In other words, as these scholars note, the digital infrastructures on which podcasting is built may lead to particular podcasts to circulate within a relatively small ideological circle. Though there are no publicly available statistics regarding The Bitter Southerner Podcast listenership, its status as a relatively unknown podcast can be understood as supporting these claims. In other words, it is likely that The Bitter Southerner Podcast circulates within relatively small digital circles that may impact the larger circulation of the progressive Southern identity that Reece seeks to construct.
Works Cited
Adler Berg, Freja Sørine. “Analysing Podcast Intimacy: Four Parameters.” Convergence, vol. 0, no. 0, 2023, pp. 1-16, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/10.1177/13548565231220547.
Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 1987, pp. 133-150, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638709383799.
Cowan, Jake. “The Constitutive Rhetoric of Late Nationalism: Imagined Communities After the Digital Revolution.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 40, no. 2, 2021, pp. 181-97, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2021.1883833.
Euritt, Alyn. “Touching Podcasts: Recognition, Eroticism, and the Haptics of Sound.” Podcasting as an Intimate Medium, Routledge, 2023, pp. 27-58.
Lopez, Debora C., Natália Cortez, Carlos Jáuregui, and Marcelo Freire. “Platformed Listening in Podcasting: An Approach from Material and Scales Potentials.” Convergence, vol. 29, no. 4, 2023, pp. 836-853.
Sullivan, John L. “The Platforms of Podcasting: Past and Present.” Social Media + Society, vol. 5, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1-12, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880002.
Swiatek, Lukasz. “The Podcast as an Intimate Bridging Medium.” Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry, Palgrave Macmillian, 2018, pp. 173-187.
“The Bitter Southerner Podcast.” The Bitter Southerner. Accessed 6 April 2025. https://bittersoutherner.com/bitter-southerner-podcast-season-one.
