Together, we are Passing Through Digital Babylon
Explaining the changes from Breaking the Digital Spell to a new venture with a new emphasis.
Hello there! Welcome to Passing Through Digital Babylon! Whether you found this from getting to the end of the newest episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, or came here from a social media post, I am honored that you’re reading this!
Let’s get right to the point: Breaking the Digital Spell, as a podcast, is going back on ice for a while. There are a multitude of factors for this, but I will outline the most relevant ones here - and what you can expect from this new endeavor.
After six months of very heavy research, writing, recording, editing, and promoting a podcast on social media, I realized I wanted to make some shifts in my work. These shifts are not only topical shifts, but practical shifts as well. Let’s start with the practical shifts, based on some numbers from the past six months:
Over the past 6 months, I have written over 56k words over seven podcast manuscripts - that doesn’t include social media or supplemental writing.
Of those 56k words, 30k of those were spread over 2 episodes, and only covering 2 months of content.
Of those 7 episodes, 4 of them were part of a series that was 37k words long and totaling more than 4 hours of audio. The first season of the podcast in 2018 was a little over 5 hours long - spread out over 13 episodes.
The only episode that wasn’t based on a manuscript - “Should Christians Leave Social Media?” - was the best performing episode of the past six months. As of this writing, it only has 120 downloads total; January’s episode, “Internet Trolls and the Quest for the Inner Ring”, only has 40 after a month of promotion.
From these numbers, I came to two conclusions: one, as a podcast, Breaking the Digital Spell was not performing very well, despite spend a part-time job’s worth of hours on it each week for nearly six months. Second, and more importantly: I was writing way, way too content to spend it on such a niche medium.
I love podcasts. It is a medium that has been tremendously influential for me, and a medium I have been passionate to use to influence others. But podcasting takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you’re going about it the way I was. Unless you’re Joe Rogan, there is a reason why many of the most popular podcasts over the past few years have been one-off series: it is very difficult to sustain a high quality podcast over an indefinite period of time. Burnout can occur very quickly.
Even though podcasting is experiencing a boon, it remains a very specific and niche medium of content. There are now more podcasts competing for listener’s attention than ever, but the number of listeners - and the 24 hours of their day - has remained relatively stable. When you take an overcrowded niche medium and write on a very niche topic that has a hard time getting traction even in traditional mediums, you’re setting yourself up for very poor returns for a substantial amount of work.
My first shift, then, is to write less and make my writing more accessible. Breaking the Digital Spell was always meant to be an outlet for my writing, but not everyone listens to podcasts, and I shouldn’t be writing small books just for a single episode. If I truly want people to benefit from my work, I should not lock it away in a specialized medium, much less write episodes that are prohibitively long and complex. Writing on a Substack will allow me to write less overall, and enable me to write about topics that couldn’t be full podcast episodes on their own.
My second shift is to directly connect with readers interested in this topic rather than shooting in the dark with social media promotions. Promoting a podcast episode often requires just as much time and work as it does to make the episode itself. You not only face the over-saturated field of podcasting in general, but you also have to play the optimal engagement game to effectively promote it on social media. Writing on a Substack will still require social media promotion, but much less than a podcast does. Most importantly: a Substack will allow me to write directly to readers who are interested in this subject, and for them to easily get in touch with me as well - especially if they decide to leave social media behind!
My third shift, and the last one I’ll write about, is a topical shift: The phrase “Breaking the Digital Spell” no longer captures what I want to emphasize in my work. The title of this Substack, “Passing Through Digital Babylon”, is based off one of my recent episodes, “On Esther, Daniel, and Exile in Digital Babylon”. In that episode, I laid out a rough sketch for a uniquely Christian and biblical framework for engaging in social media, and in the following weeks after releasing that episode I realized there was more to this idea than I initially thought. Specifically, I want to help Christians (and especially pastors and ministry leaders) navigate living in a space and time that many of us do not want to live in, do not fully understand, and have good reason to be afraid of. I don’t want people to just break the digital spell; I want them to endure well in this God-ordained context as they journey towards their final, eternal home in the new heavens in the new earth. By blending biblical studies with media criticism, I hope to point readers to the promise that the Kingdom of God is coming, and nothing the digitized kingdom of man does can stop it.
So, if you subscribe to this Substack, what can you expect in your email inboxes?
A broader range of much shorter writing: essays, reflections, explainers, analysis on changes and developments in the media landscape, and more.
Bite-sized commentary on books you may want to read: beginning next week, I will begin publishing bi-weekly entries highlighting helpful quotes and ideas from books I am currently reading. The first book on deck is Jeff Bilbro’s “Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News”.
Eventually, with enough subscribers, I hope to do subscriber-only threads and discussions. Not only do I want to connect with readers directly (which Substack does quite well), I want readers to be able to connect and discuss with other readers.
At the end of each podcast episode, I would conclude with the line “My name is Austin, and together, we are breaking the digital spell.” The podcast may be going away, but my emphasis on working together has not. I no longer believe our goal should be to just break the digital spell; I believe that our goal is to stand before the King sitting on the throne of the eternal city we are journeying towards, and together, we are merely passing through Digital Babylon.