Maeve Higgins: We're all in thrall to the one-way intimacy of podcasts

I make them and listen to them — and yet, I feel a strange ambivalence about podcasts and their proliferation in our private lives

Podcasts have become the soundtrack to our private lives, with Apple’s platform alone hosting some 47m episodes as of March 2021. Stock picture

I turned the light on in my kitchen last night and heard dozens of podcasts skittering away underfoot. I wasn’t surprised. As I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, I caught the faint sound of a podcast from next door. When I went to bed, there were at least three podcasts flitting and circling the lampshade. This morning on my way to work via the subterranean world of the subway, I knew that running along the tracks and through the commuters’ earphones, there were entire families of podcasts shuttling alongside me throughout the city.

Podcasts are invisible, and podcasts are everywhere, almost like a particular virus we’ve all come to know these past two years. But unlike Covid-19, there is no known technology, no mask or booster shot, to guard against a podcast getting into one’s system. We are all vulnerable to podcasts and their ever-evolving network of transition; they pass from person to person via word of mouth or from one podcast host showing up on a different podcast and sharing the microphone with that podcast host.