I remember as a very young girl how I would love to fall asleep listening to a diverse selection of audiobooks that had the ability to transport me to another time or place and influence my own mind’s dreams before drifting off. There was just something so special and alluring about closing my eyes and letting my imagination run wild alongside the words being spoken inside my head.

Audio books, or the more recently popularised podcast, allows people to engage with their media on a deeper and more personalised level. Just like audio books, podcasts lets the user create their own visual experience that is personalised, likeable and relatable to their own life.

According to the work titled ‘Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication’ It was as early as 1922 when New York’s WGY broadcast over 40 original dramas, showing radio’s potential as a medium for drama. The WGY players created their own scripts and performed them live on air.

The power and influence that audio media has had on public life can be exemplified by the renowned ‘War of The World’s’ Drama radio show that happened on October 30th 1938. The drama involved a fabrication of a dance music program that became interrupted by a series of fake news broadcasts alerting listeners of a dramatic Martian invasion. According to BBC reporter Sir Christopher Frayling, the program was ‘broadcast at a time when America was in the grip of pre-WW2 invasion anxiety, fearing that Nazi Germany would make an attack on mainland America.

At the time the reported response from the American public was supposedly extreme with many groups rumoured to have fled their homes and towns alongside there being a widespread sense of panic and unease. The whole supposed reaction of hysteria and hype surrounding the War of the World’s phenomenon was later queried by social research scientists as perhaps being an exaggerated account. But regardless of potential fallacy, the legacy of the War of the World’s drama, and the myths that have surrounded it for centuries, are commentaries on the influence and impact audio drama can have on the public and it’s ability to completely seize emotion and imagination.

With reference to a more personal perspective on audio media, I myself tend to become very involved and attached to any sort of media that I have the ability to put my own suitable twist on. It is always upsetting, and almost betraying, when a favorite podcast, book, or song later releases visuals that I feel do not reflect what I had portrayed in my own mind.

You feel a little cheated when you have spent however long exploring and imagining a faceless form of media in your head, dreaming up all the people and places that you saw as being perfectly fit, only to have a bigger and more powerful perspective drown out your cherished envisions.

In order to explore and express a way in which this style of media has captured and engaged my own life and mind, I wanted to create an audio version of what is to me is an incredibly special and meaningful book. I became attached to and inclined by John Green’s novel ‘Looking for Alaska’ through a kind of coming of age period in my own life. In my head I created and watched an intimate experience and perception of the novel and I believe this was what tied me so intricately and emotionally to it.

Consuming this style of blind media enables us to really link ourselves to it, to see our own life and journey in it’s story. With the film rights of Looking for Alaska having been sold to Paramount Pictures, and the potential for an eventual less than satisfactory portrayal of the story, I hope I can salvage in my mind, and maybe generate in the minds of others, a unique and sentimental personalised tale of love, loss, and hope that can be appreciated and fantasized.

-McFadden, JB, 2016. ‘Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication’. 2nd ed. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing .

-BBC News. 2013. The War of the Worlds at 75: Still invading our fears. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131029-war-of-the-worlds-viral-radio. [Accessed 14 March 2017].

-Hypable. 2016. ‘Looking For Alaska’ movie: Things are bad between John Green and studio. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.hypable.com/john-green-paramount-looking-for-alaska-movie-feud/. [Accessed 16 March 2017].