Recently, visiting the rural village where I grew up on the Baltic Sea coast of Sweden, I was intrigued by how the pattern of my high school friends’ conversations had changed. Over the decade and a half I had been gone, their speech had taken on an unmistakable tone, one that I do not associate with the pine forests and beach meadows and old lumber mills: that of American intellectual interview podcasts.
The shift isn’t all that surprising, given that they have likely spent more time listening to Lex Fridman and others talk than they have spent listening to their colleagues talk at work, especially because Scandinavia has the highest rate of podcast penetration in the world. Though podcasts are not an ideal medium for conveying information, they are ideal for the transmission of patterns of speech and thought. We’re not particularly good at learning facts by listening, but we are good at modeling the tone, cadence, and form of speech we listen to, especially if it is as unstructured and informal as a conversation.
When listening to a recording of someone talking, you react much as you do when talking to someone in person. It is a parasocial interaction, a psychological illusion in which you behave as if you are in a social situation, even though the other party is just a voice in your headphones. You shift your behavior to match the recording and begin to unconsciously mimic the talkers’ speech patterns. The more informal the tone, the stronger this illusion of interacting with the other person, and the more we converge toward their tone. The convergence toward the values and speech patterns of the person we are talking to (or have the psychological illusion of talking to) also increases if we perceive them as higher in status than we are. All of this points to intellectual interview podcasts—such The Ezra Klein Show, Conversations with Tyler, or The Tim Ferriss Show— being a new and powerful means of spreading speech patterns.
With repeated exposure, the mimicry that your social instincts induce can permanently reshape the way you speak. We see this in the vanishing of strong regional dialects as media spread and people have more interactions with people with other dialects, and in the numerous grammatical constructions that have spread by being used on television.
This speech mimicry is easy to hear where I grew up, since the new phrases and grammatical constructions come from a different language. At a rural Swedish pizzeria, my friends asked me to steelman the case against a point I was making, saying the word in English. Or they would mess up the word order in a Swedish sentence by doing a direct translation of a speech pattern they’ve picked up from a podcast (“Let me reflect back what you said”).
And since we internalize these patterns and use them as a latticework for our thought—how does our thinking change in this new media climate?
In 1962, the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas published one of the foundational works in media studies, a book called The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Habermas argued that what he calls the public sphere—a space separate from both private life and the state, where people engage in intellectual discussions about the society they live in—did not exist in the Middle Ages. There were only private conversations and official government proclamations.
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