This American Life....

October 22, 2012

Mayeesa

Mediated Communications 1111-06

Professor Bradley Lambert

Podcast Analysis

Podcast Name: This American Life, Episode 475- Send A Message- 06.28.12

            In this episode, Ira Glass uncovers how communication can be skewed; intentionally and unintentionally. Through the light-hearted conversational style that is trademark to "This American Life", Glass tells the stories of messages relayed through various mediums who's recipients try their best to decipher their meanings.

            The prologue introduces the theme of the episode through an interview with reporter Josh Bearman. He tells about the misguided decoding of scrambled messages sent from Galileo to Johannes Kepler in the 17th century. In the first act, the story of a traveling pair of pants and pink dress is uncovered as Producer Brian Reid reports. Reid tells of a family whose tradition is to send the message of an unborn child's gender through these garments to a pregnant woman in the family originated 35 years ago and has been right (almost) every time.  Act 2, features the audio of comedian Dave Hill during a live show at the Cameo Gallery in Brooklyn where he tells the story of his adventure in a New York subway station.  A homeless man threatens Hill and he learns that messages can still come in bottles.

            In the 3rd act, Sonari Glinton, a reporter for NPR news tells about his childhood in Chicago's South Side and how a messenger is sometimes more important than the message. The White principle of Glinton's grade school changed his ideas of Jesus' image by simply changing the crucifix that adorned the front of the classroom. Nancy Updike brings the final act, telling the story of how one father recorded conversations with his family at home and in his car in which he tried to get them on his side after his wife left him. 12 years after his father's death, Bill finally decided to listen to the tapes and discovered that he wasn't as heroic as he believed he was.

            I found the most compelling portion of this podcast to be act 3 in which Sonari Glinton talks about his grade school principle, Sister Rosemary Brennan. Glinton does very well in setting the scene of the time period; explaining how important Jesse Jackson's run for presidency was to his community and telling how the South Side of Chicago, his childhood neighborhood, became increasingly black during his grade school years. At first , these facts seem unimportant but  the relevance becomes apparent as Glinton goes into the story of how Sister Brennan changed the crucifix in each of the classrooms in his Catholic grade school. Glinton uses great imagery describing his principal as a short Irish woman who stood on her tiptoes onto of a chair to reach the crucifix in his classroom. Through Glinton's description of Sister Brennan we as listeners gain an instant respect for her knowing that she quietly demanded it. The conflict of the story was Sister Brennan replacing the White Jesus crucifix, that had been a main fixture in each classroom, with a Black Jesus crucifix. She allowed Glinton and the other students in the class to believe that the only sinless man to walk this Earth looked like them. I believe the final aspect of the segment, a song by Nina Hagen entitled "Personal Jesus" brought it all together helping the listener to understand the moral of the story.