Thinking Unenslaved

I’ve spent the past several days listening to various skeptic, atheist, and agnostic audio podcasts. A few of them were quite entertaining (Brian Dunning is excellent, for example), while (what was to me) a surprising amount appeared to consist largely of insider information to small, specific sub-communities of individuals. In a tweet I posted in the middle of that research, I bemoaned our lack of an appreciable foothold in that medium. Indeed, I was rather disappointed about this at first, until I remembered what a great group of skeptics, atheists, and agnostics we have on YouTube, and whose reach is literally millions.

Now, as much as I love people like Thuderf00t, AntitheistAngie, ZOMGitsCriss, Zinnia Jones, The Thinking Atheist, and many others, the problem I have with YouTube is the reliance on visual cues, overlays, and the like, to communicate ideas. There’s nothing wrong with this at all (in fact, as a photographer, I naturally LOVE it), but what about the viewer or listener with too much to do to sit around watching videos? What about the person who’d like to put a podcast on while doing chores, or driving around town? To be explicit, what about the kind of person who could listen attentively, but not watch? Communications that rely on visual content to convey meaning either miss this type of listener, or the listener fails to completely benefit from the medium.

I’ve struggled with this for a long time, actually. Very early on, when I started becoming involved in the ThinkAtheist Radio Show (formerly on TalkShoe and BlogTalkRadio), I contemplated switching it to a video-format, YouTube-based show. Several things stood in the way of that (not the least of which was the lack of time), and ultimately, I was rather fond of the general format of our show: free-form, unscripted live talk. Obviously, I chose not to vary from that format.

As I said, there are a few audio podcasts that I really like: Skepchick, Skeptoid, Freethought Radio, The Atheist Experience, and others, but these also have their quirks. Freethought Radio in particular rather disappoints me: These are good, intelligent people, but the format is over-commercialized, and the participants, at least in the few shows I’ve listened to, appear to be so committed to “staying on time” and “sticking to the point” that their interviews can be stilted, one-sided, interruptive, and often have an annoying tendency to sound far more patronizing to the interviewee than informative or instructive to the audience.

To be clear, I must point out that Skepchick and Skeptoid don’t fall into the description I just gave (that was for Freethought Radio alone). I love their shows, and just wanted to make sure I linked to them.

To refrain from picking on shows from organizations that I otherwise admire, suffice it to say that I find myself in that position where I listen to something (even several somethings) and I realize the opportunities missed, the messages not delivered, the discourse left behind, and it reminds me that the emotions engendered by sitting around and noticing that could be better served by my getting off my ass and doing something about it. Not that I believe I would consistently do better, but I’d certainly try. And I’ve had much encouragement of late to do so.

As well, our guests on the old ThinkAtheist Radio Show had this interesting tendency to ask us if they could come back on for another interview, and this held true for the very short run I did with my own show. Our shows were dynamic, and a modicum of topic-wandering was not only welcome, but expected. There was no agenda for us as interviewers to keep in context: I’d have been just as happy (from a show perspective) if one of our participants suddenly announced his or her undying fealty to Jebus as I would if we had spent 60 minutes talking about his or her escape from organized religion. But the bottom line for me is that my guests enjoyed what I did well enough to ask to come back. I was obviously doing something right.

I halted my own show largely for a reason that has now resolved itself. That reason essentially boiled down to time. When I stopped the show, I was doing 12-16 hours/week at our TaeKwonDo academy, 10-18 hours/week on the soccer fields, and whatever time I could get with my children, atop a typical 40-50 hour work-week. For other health reasons, I’ve had to stop doing TaeKwonDo, and now that we’re in the winter months, soccer is only 2-8 hours/week, and I’ve already let the various administrations know that I can do as many games in the future as I’ve done in the past. I’m kind of enjoying having time to myself, and to date, and those kinds of things.

And I’ve discovered that I miss doing the show. Which is funny, because for a while there, I wasn’t missing it at all. Time works wonders, I guess.

So, at the repeated prompting of a few friends, and a general round of acceptance from the community at large, I’m reviving Synthaetic Synapse as Think Unenslaved. I’m waiting on some new equipment, and I’m setting up some intro and interstitial music, and even some commercial plugs for communities of which I’m a member and national organizations of whom I’m fond. I’m lining up some occasional co-hosts and guests, and putting a bit more organization around the show as a whole. I’ll consider reopening communications with ThinkAtheist (I re-subscribed to the site last week) and seeing if they’d like to “sponsor” the show (without pay), but I will retain my independence regardless. The show format will be very much as it always was: which means that there will be three major classifications of shows.

1. Co-hosted show: Myself and a co-host would cover international, national, and local news related to the atheist/agnostic/freethought community as a whole. The topics selected will lead to discussion between the two hosts. We’ll limit that segment to approximately one hour, and have similar material prepared for the second hour should callers not fill up the second segment.

2. Solo show: This is where I diatribe on one subject or another for a while (this may either be live or in a pre-recorded/edited/prepared format and replayed). Related to that subject, I’ll have a live guest or two with subject-matter expertise on that and related topics. This segment will last 60-90 minutes, with an open-phones segment at the end.

3. Round-table show: This is a pure round-table format, possibly with a co-host/moderator, and with multiple (3-4) guests on hot-button topics of interest. The round table will spend 15-20 minutes per topic on up to six topics, taking callers for one or two questions during each segment, and solving all the world’s problems in a single two-hour show.

I anticipate kicking off the new show over the first weekend of December, 2010. Check back on this site for updates over the next few weeks, and be sure to follow my Twitter and Facebook posts for show times and additional information. I’ll continue to run the show from it’s current location at Blog Talk Radio, but un:enslaved will serve up supplemental information, associated content, the show archive, and those types of things too.

Some of you know there was a bit of an incident a couple of nights ago between myself and another outspoken Atheist, who also promotes herself as a Humanist. This happened on Twitter, in the public stream. It was highly unproductive, and rather unfortunate. But it was the proverbial “last straw” for me in terms of accepting as “directive” what I feel to be a highly destructive approach to ourselves as Atheists when interacting with Theists, and if my inability to let that subject go makes me immature and/or intolerant in some people’s eyes, then more people than the handful who unfollowed me due to that event need to unfollow me.

The situation with that person goes far deeper than what was exemplified on Twitter, and it has thus been difficult for me to let it go on that level as well. I’m not going to bring that in the discussion tonight, but since that little confluence of actions has led to a minor separation between some of us on Twitter, I think that ideological separation is a valid subject to broach here.

Luckily, I’d already invited Kile Jones on tonight’s show. I can’t think of a better, more thoughtful and considerate person with whom to discuss these matters. So, following on a little bit from last week’s show on Humanism, Secularism, and Atheism, Kile and I will be discussing the potential dangers in all three of those philosophical approaches, and hopefully, we’ll talk about some strategies for those of us with different approaches to our interactions with Theists and Religionists. My discussions with Kile are always insightful, and I dare say even inspirational. I’ve managed to swing all the way from being a bit reticent to do a show tonight, to being completely stoked. I look forward to a great time with Kile, and those of you who choose to dial in!

Please join me tonight at 11PM EDT/10 CDT/8 PDT for “Thinking Freely: Overrated By Some” with Kile Jones.