Serial is the hottest new podcast that's working everybody up into a lather. It's the number one podcast not only in the United States, but also Australia, and the United Kingdom. If you haven't started listening to it, start listening to it.
Serial follows the conventions of sequential storytelling -- conventions that came out of the Victorian era, when books were issued as installments. For instance, each chapter of Great Expectations arrived to the public simply as a link in an ongoing narrative -- its own self-contained unit with elements of cliffhanger suspense built in. Only later were the bits collected and put together in book form (and this was simply to make money twice).
That's how Serial is supposed to get you: The feeling of true waiting -- something that is lost in our digital culture where all things are instantaneously present simultaneously -- is a novel sensation. Pardon the pun.
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