Category Archives: Pop Culture Sociologist

Pop Culture Sociologist Q&A!

For this special episode listeners submitted questions and the host answered them in a live, unscripted recording. Questions included everything from the writing process to opinions about genres and different social issues.

You can navigate the episode using these timestamps:

0:00 – Intro and an explanation about what this episode is, where questions came from, and how the episode works.

3:09 –
I would love to hear about the writing process for each episode – if there is a standard process and if so what is it?

19:30 –
Do you start from a phenomenon and look for suitable works or vice versa?

25:10 –
In writing the episodes and analyzing media – how prominent is your inner author vs the former sociology student?

28:29 –
How do you balance between choosing topics that are popular / catchy enough to be interesting to others, and avoiding topics that are overdone?

35:45 –
Who do you think is the perfect / target audience for the podcast?

43:42 –
A question about the last episode – are you going to revisit the topic after watching the second season of “Motherland: Fort Salem”? I’m really curious to hear what you’ll have to say about it, in comparison and in general.

47:22 –
In the episode on Fort Salem you touched a bit on the issue of loyalty to a team made up entirely of women. Are there more examples of female partnerships and female friendship in the media you love?

51:22 –
I was wondering if you wanted to expand on dealing with real historical people in fiction from the KJ Charles/Devil’s Mistress episode. In one of her books (Seditious Affair), Charles uses not only characters but dialogue gleaned from trial documents to tell about a doomed group of rebels, and I find it personally so sad to read because I know they were really hanged. How do you think choices like this help or hinder the overall effect of what an author is trying to do?

55:58 –
Can you compare Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings, and how the two works deal with World War II and its aftermath (Lord of the Rings for Germany against the Allies, and Harry Potter with the idea of the superiority of pure-blooded sorcerers).

59:28 –
Please tell the whole class how black sails is a perfect series and everyone should watch it.

1:06:27 –
Whats the right way to bridge a cultural gap (for example – Americans who write about China, white people writing about black people, straights about queer people, etc.), and is it right to try and bridge that gap at all?

1:08:13 –
How does audiovisual pop culture use poetry? What does it mean when a character reads, writes, quotes, or recites poetry in film/TV/video games — what does that tend to say about that character, and what does that say about our popular conception of poets and poetry?

1:12:08 –
What are you looking for today in historical novels (or series / movies) and where did you find it?

1:17:29 –
Is there a chance that in future episodes you’ll talk about children’s literature / fantasy / detective / romantic novel

1:21:19 – Final thoughts

Introducing: Pop Culture Sociologist!

Towards the end of 2020, the plague year, when I became unemployed for the first time in my adult life, when I finished the second draft of a novel, when very odd and not entirely cheerful things were happening around the world, I decided to start a podcast.

The point of starting it was that I missed doing media criticism, but couldn’t justify the time it took to pitch and write proper articles, or even blog posts, because all the time I could spend writing in front of a computer had to be spent on writing fiction, or in very rare cases when I really felt like letting loose and treating myself, fanfiction.

Creatively, it was pretty dispiriting. My novel was nowhere near done, I was about to start my third year of working on it, I poured so many hours of my life into writing it and none of it was publishable. And I really missed sharing my thoughts about media with people!

So, a podcast seemed like the perfect solution. Apparently you could just make them at home now, and being audio, it wouldn’t compete with my writing time. Perfect!

Needless to say, a lot of those assumptions turned out to be… not quite true? But I still went ahead and created a podcast. Pop Culture Sociologist, because I figured whatever I was talking about it would be related to sociology somehow. It’s the field that colors my view of the world the most.

As of writing this post there is a trailer for the podcast, and also a first episode! I promise every future episode will have its own post, but for this first one I was still very much testing things out and learning the basics.

Anyway, the responses have already been amazing, and I’m so, so grateful I was able to spend time on this project. In the first 3 weeks the podcast (trailer + 1st episode) has been downloaded over 250 times (not all of those are actually unique listeners of course, but it’s still a staggering number).

But more than that, people keep talking to me about it, which is the most amazing thing and the reason I love media criticism to begin with. There’s nothing more amazing than knowing people are interested in your ideas, and it’s been a really great ray of sunshine in these Troubled Times.

After the first episode launched I also created a Patreon to allow people to support the podcast if they wanted to. I’ve resisted getting a Patreon for years as a writer, for a variety of reasons (to be clear: Patreons are great and I encourage anyone who wants one to open one!), but as a podcaster I guess that’s changed. Mostly because writing, for me, “costs” only my time, and when I was still writing short stories I also made a few hundred dollars a year doing it, which covered things like website costs.

But with a podcast, the costs are much greater, because you’re producing a piece of media, and 2021 is not a great time for me financially, so friends have held my hand and told me this is a perfectly fine reason to allow people to pitch in, if they want to.

Anyway, here we go, the intro post is done! For weeks before I took the plunge I walked around asking friends to talk me out of doing a podcast. But now it’s real, and it’s out there, people seem to like it. Can’t wait to see what’s next on this adventure, and hope you’ll take come along with me to find out!