New and old as one on your smartphone

A colleague and I were discussing a new podcast, "Serial," that he thought I ought to catch up on.

Funny timing; I'd just seen someone else on Facebook recommend it. My colleague made a good case for it, and I repeated an old line that my friend Jim and I have said for years: If you have a good story, people will follow it, buy it, regardless of medium.

And a possible truth dawned on us both about technology today - so often vilified for dividing people, destroying memory capacity, reducing the population's IQ (good arguments could be made about how the average IQ might not be all that great anyway). A possibility that evil digital technology is actually not so terrible in one way, at least.

It's retro. It's oral tradition. Only now, instead of gathering around a fire, you download an episode of people telling stories, and you listen to the stories, and you share - in this case, verbally - with people around you. You share the story. It lives on.

It's a brand new, yet ancient version of storytellers of centuries past, who entertained, educated, motivated, shamed, bonded tribes of people with compelling stories. Stories that became the Greek myths, or folktales, or fairy tales.

This is not an essay defending video zombieism. Nor am I excusing corporate greed, or the transformation of the American retail landscape by the likes of Wal-Mart and Amazon.

I'm saying this could be bigger than even them.

"Serial" has broken records for numbers of people downloading it - more than 2 million downloads per episode. It's a phenomenon. Word of mouth is the best advertising.

It reminds me too of President Franklin Roosevelt and his Fireside Chats; people gathering to listen to and discuss the latest missive.

Somehow it brings me a measure of peace in these fractured, violent, and stressful times to know that a popular, portable, and affordable format is making possible in a new direction one of the very first ways people came together and shared information.

Storytelling has power.