Rorshok makes ten minute audio updates about different countries. These updates come from people within those countries. We do this for many reasons that we'll talk about below, but maybe the biggest reason is that we are interested in the people who will listen to them.
When we think about who might listen to them, we particularly imagine people who have moved to those countries, people from abroad who lived there for some time. We are interested in migrants in general; we think they are an important group, one that is so heterogeneous that it is strange even to refer to them as a single group. But people who move around the world share experiences that make them uniquely insightful into our ever more interconnected world. Whether they are people from Africa migrating to Europe, or people from Europe migrating to Asia, or anybody moving to or considering the possibility of moving to a new place, we want to connect with them; and one day to connect them with each other.
Nobody else is doing this because there isn't much commercially to be gained from focusing on this group, certainly not in the way we are. This group is so diverse that it isn’t really “a market”; it is pointless to try to sell to them as a group. So the Marketing Industrial Complex doesn't care about them.
The corporations that own the currently unregulated social media platforms make a great deal of money by isolating people and driving them to ever more brief and divisive stories or content. The more divisive, the more people tend to scroll and click. The people interested in a specific country are a wildly diverse group, which makes the task of choosing what is most important there during a given week challenging and interesting. It is also ultimately a unifying task. We feel good about that, in this ever more divided world. Also, it may be tough for migrants in a country to know what is happening there. People from there may not tell them, there may be language issues, they may be busy, shy, or isolated. This modest amount of information Rorshok produces may be just enough to give them a better ability to more confidently join conversations with nationals and experts.
There are many potential groups who may want to listen, particularly people who live in the countries we cover, as we've said, especially migrants. Some people native to the country may be interested because domestic media may be low quality, biased, or cover more than they want to hear about. We also hope to appeal to people who are thinking about going to the countries we cover, or went there and want to keep a connection, perhaps because they have a connection with somebody living there. Or people who visited and want to keep a connection to the place in general. Or maybe they have a coworker or classmate from that place. Our hope is that anybody who listens for a few weeks, will increasingly get a sense of what's happening in that particular country. And what is happening there is very different from what international media emphasizes about that country.
The volume of information available on the internet, even about even small topics, is so vast that for a particular individual it is practically unlimited. But the automated tools and algorithms that play an ever increasing role in information dissemination, aren’t very good at curating what is important. Considerable funds and effort go into optimizing search results. Tons of information is now created and optimized onto your screens by bots, algorithms and Artificial Intelligence at the service of various political and financial interests. That is why we work with human beings in-country to decide what is most important and what is not important enough to make it within the ten minutes. And we think and discuss a great deal about how best to do this.
The updates are in audio or podcast format because you can listen while doing something other than look at a screen with your eyes, for example you can cook, commute, farm, scan the horizon. We think audio information is an exciting format that is still pretty new. Also print can be easily hijacked. It’s quite common for on-line print to be copied by bots, repackaged, reposted, repurposed, and often changed. Not so with audio information.
We use English because it is by far the dominant international language at this moment in history. It is the only living language where many more people speak it as a second language than as a first. For people who are curious about the rest of the world, learning English is a good way to travel, at least intellectually.
Why are they about countries and not cities, or other areas or topics? One day we may do updates about things other than countries. But countries are the predominant organizing unit of the world right now so countries seemed a good place to start.
We don't have advertisements for a few reasons. The first is that ads take up time and nobody wants to listen to them. The second is that we don't know who may want to advertise with us, they may sell bad products. We feel some responsibility to listeners and wouldn't want to steer them wrong. We are so strict with time that we don't even put credits in the show.
The internet makes it so much easier now than it was in the past to know what is happening, what’s really happening in other parts of the world. Because it is so much easier, it is disappointing how much misunderstanding and misinformation and how many stereotypes persist. We think these updates might help, and some agree with us. Many parts of what we do are done by volunteers, the people who read the updates and others who let people know about them and help with other important aspects of this work. So if you want to be a part of this beyond just listening, join us.