Podcasts at Hay Book Festival
Thinking of the way we consume arts and media brings me to the recent week I have spent at the Hay Book Festival.
All the talks were available on a podcast. As the area is Wi-Fi you no longer need to sit in a stuffy tent on a plastic chair when you can sit back in your deckchair in the sunshine and hear it on a podcast.
So I did both. Those talks which were impossible to get tickets for I downloaded. But it raises an interesting question: unless there are visuals or something other than two talking heads (the author and the interviewer).
do you really need to see them in the flesh?
Only one event I attended did I feel that the physical presence of the author was essential and that was with the South African photographer Austin Stevens (“the snake man”).
He made his talk interactive: he produced a python and a boa constrictor for people to touch.
And yes folk lined up in orderly queues for the pleasure/horror of touching live snakes.
Now you cant get that on a podcast!
