UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal

Podcasts are useful for influencing the way the audience thinks – audio drama especially lends itself to this application, with writers being able to cloak stronger political messages within the fictionalized worlds of their narratives. Podcasts like Limetown and Within The Wires can effectively tell stories about political and social issues through their involvement of the audience in the world of the work. The familiarity of the audience with the auditory styling of the podcast as well as the clear audio signposting used in both podcasts gives the audience a touchstone to their everyday life that makes it less strenuous to situate themselves in the fictional world and focus on the narrative despite other potential distractions. Through close listening examinations of both podcasts, I analyze and discuss the impact that the scripting and use of audio elements have on the audience's perception of the narrative and the implications for audio drama and podcasting as a whole. While Within the Wires is slightly more effective in the use of formats that are fairly universal in their recognizability to the audience, Limetown is more familiar to those who have listened to other podcasts before; this combined with Limetown's similarities to the critically acclaimed investigative journalism podcast Serial had significant impacts on each podcast's popularity.

Keywords: podcasts, audio drama, Limetown, Within the Wires, Serial, audience perception