The Listening Post: In the Field and On the Ground

I never know what to expect from an interview. I know that’s just the way any conversation with another person is, recorded or not. I just can’t shake the anxiety and fear of the unknown, even though it’s an inescapable aspect of human interaction. The strange part is, I enjoy it. I love the equal parts improvisational and structured style of an interview, like the old cartoons where a character would be building the train tracks from the front of a runaway engine car. You don’t know where you’re going, but you know that you’re (hopefully) in control of the path you take.

This is increased to the nth degree when people aren’t expecting to be interviewed. Media pundits, politicians, experts, and even celebrities are called upon regularly to explain or contextualize the happenings of society. But often we find what they’re saying disjointed, or not grounded in what everyday life actually is, like Bill Gates trying to guess prices of food at the supermarket.

What happens when the community is in control? Who decides what story, when, and how it needs to be reported? Through the Listening Post Collective, newsrooms work with communities to make their stories heard on their own terms.

I set up an impromptu “Listening Post” in the Philadelphia OIC, an organization that provides open access to computers and arms its community with the knowledge it needs to succeed in their use. After a few short minutes of sitting with employees to ask some simple questions and get a feel for the facilities, I turned to find a few not-so-surreptitious people waiting to see what was going on, almost expecting their turn, like my microphone was their clarion call.

I think everyone daydreams about what it’s like to be interviewed. You play the part of both the interviewer and the interviewee, creating precise questions that were designed just for the answer you were waiting to give to yourself. But of course that’s not the case if you found a microphone in your face unprepared; even our greatest interviewer can’t read minds.

The most distinct person to sit across from me that day was a young black woman named Daryan. As she waited for her turn, she stood chatting with another woman while flitting her eyes back and forth between me and her, anxiously fidgeting with the button of her sharp blue blazer.

Although the answers she provided did not necessarily scream “story material” at the time of our conversation, after replaying it over in my head later that night I realized the banality of the things she was saying reminded me of what people I know say. That’s the part that stuck out to me. More than any of the other normal people with normal answers I spoke to that day, she was the most normal. Just a normal woman who wanted to speak truth to her experience. This made me reflect on what were initially the most noteworthy stories and what made them that way.

At the end of the day, I think that grounding yourself in the stories of people who are not your neighbors or your coworkers or your friends reminds you of how many more similarities we have with strangers than we do differences. The Listening Post does so much good for the restructuring of power in the media-community relationship, but it also keeps the inner- and inter-community relationships vibrant and cohesive.