Serialità e intimità nel podcasting politico contemporaneo = Seriality and intimacy in contemporary political podcasting

Abstract

This article investigates the communicative potential of podcasting as a strategic medium for contemporary political communication, arguing that its distinctive aesthetics - rooted in seriality, intimacy, and personalized listening - make it particularly suited to engaging citizens, especially younger audiences, in political discourse. Drawing on recent shifts in news consumption, including declining trust in legacy media and rising patterns of news avoidance among social-media-native cohorts, the article situates podcasting within an evolving media ecosystem in which audiences increasingly seek proximity, emotional resonance, and narrated forms of political explanation. The first part examines podcast seriality as both a narrative structure and a relational device. Serial formats foster sustained engagement over time, producing forms of temporal rituality and affective continuity that strengthen the relationship between hosts and audiences. The second part explores the aesthetics of intimacy enabled by the medium's technical affordances and stylistic conventions. Through first-person storytelling, informal language, and the embodied presence of the voice, podcasts generate a sense of closeness that can foster empathy, identification, and community-building. Four international case studies - Brexitcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, Bunga Bunga, and The Right Kind of Family - illustrate how podcasting can alternatively function as a space for collective sense-making, ideological mobilization, critical narration, and transnational investigative journalism. These cases demonstrate the medium's versatility as both an interpretive archive and a real-time political intervention. Ultimately, podcasting is presented as a flexible political infrastructure whose relational and affective capacities make it increasingly central to public communication in a hybrid media environment.