Phone a Community Pt.1: An Introduction to the “Phone a Friend” Podcast Online Community

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You may have heard of George Ezra before, even more likely, you have had one of his summer hits (“Budapest” & “Shot Gun” being some of his most popular) stuck in your head. The British star and his high school “mate”, Ollie McKendrick Ness started a podcast in 2019 as a place to document their therapeutic habit of phoning a friend, with the hopes of helping listeners with similar mental health struggles along the way. In their podcast, Phone a Friend the co-hosts discuss their personal experiences with mental health not just reaping the benefits of talking to a friend but also, encouraging their listeners to be more open about discussing mental health with their family, friends, or professionals. In addition to discussing mental health and having friendly banter, there is a segment in the show where Ezra and Mckendrick Ness answer listeners’ emails where listeners share how the podcast has helped them, stories of their personal struggles (or the personal struggles of someone they may know) with mental health, and advice and encouragement to other listeners of the show. The Phone a Friend community has grown since its start where the only communication opportunities with the community possible were sending an email to be considered to be featured on the show or engaging in interactions on the official podcast instagram page. Now, there are multiple fan/meme pages on Instagram and most recently, a Discord server dedicated to the Phone a Friend podcast where fans are able to communicate with each other and occasionally with the co-hosts themselves.

Over the past few months I have observed this online podcast community by listening to six of the weekly uploaded podcast as they were released, noting the listeners’ email segment and recording what occurred on the official Phone a Friend podcast Instagram (@phoneafriendpod) and multiple fan/meme accounts (@phoneafriendmemes, @draw.a.friend, and @george_freya_ollie_are_petan). My goal was to answer the following two questions: How do individuals in the “Phone a Friend” podcast community communicate? and How does the community and its associated podcast influence the lives of its members/listeners?

Before I took a deep dive into the analysis of this online podcast community, I considered previous resources that discuss similar observation of online communities and online communication. This is what I found:

1. Amber Muller’s research article, “Virtual Communities and Translation into Physical Reality in the ‘It Gets Better’ Project” importantly explains and considers what makes an online community a “community”. I considered this explanation as I decided to study the Phone a Friend online community and compared what is mentioned in this article with my findings.
2. Rachelle Pavelko and Jessica Myrick’s research study of the My Favorite Murder true crime podcast community titled, “Muderinos and Media Effects: How the My Favorite Murder Podcast and Its Social Media Community May Promote Well-Being in Audiences with Mental Illness”. In this study, Pavelko and Myrick note the conversation of mental health by the podcast’s hosts and its listeners from communication in the podcast episodes themselves and on a My Favorite Murder Facebook fan page. I felt like this study reflected many elements of my own observation of the Phone a Friend podcast as it focused on the mental health conversation in a podcast community.
3. Kyle Wrather’s research study, “Making ‘Maximum Fun’ for Fans: Examining Podcast Listener Participation Online”, explains how podcast shows use online mediums to create interaction with their listeners which then provides material to be discussed in future episodes. As you will see in the following blog posts this phenomena is present in the Phone a Friend podcast community as well. This research study helped me recognize and identify this occurrence.
4. Albert Park, Mark Conway, and Annie Chen’s research study titled, “Examining Thematic Similarity, Difference, and Membership in Three Online Mental Health Communities from Reddit: A Text Mining and Visualization Approach” observes three mental health subreddits on Reddit. This helped me understand the communication when studying the Phone a Friend podcast community who largely discuss mental health.
5. I found an episode titled “Making Friends” from the popular podcast, Reply All with hosts PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman helpful in understanding what would draw people to an online community like I recognized in the Phone a Friend community. This episode discusses a Reddit community that creates “Tulpas”, imagined identities that the person who created can hear as if they are speaking to them physically, but they are in their own head. The individuals interviewed in this episode express that finding this community gave them relief and a sense of belonging with having others like them share their experience in an online platform. This helped me understand the listeners who claimed feeling the same way to the Phone a Friend podcast.
6. Lastly, in his TEDxAugusta presentation, Jim Rawson, highlights positive outcomes of participating in online communities. This helped me understand possible positive outcomes that the Phone a Friend community could create.

Keep an eye out for these sources in my next blog posts and see how I was able to draw connections to them with the Phone a Friend online community. Join me in the next blog post in this series to learn what I witnessed in the reply to listeners’ segment of the podcast with my research questions and goals in mind!

References

Goldman, Alex and PJ Vogt, hosts. “Making Friends” Reply All, episode 74, Gimlet, 24 August 2016, https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/49hr6k.

Muller, Amber. “Virtual Communities and Translation into Physical Reality in the ‘It Gets Better’ Project.” Journal of Media Practice, vol. 12, no. 3, 2011, pp. 269–277., doi:10.1386/jmpr.12.3.269_1.

Park, Albert, Mark Conway and Annie Chen. “Examining Thematic Similarity, Difference, and Membership in Three Online Mental Health Communities from Reddit: A Text Mining and Visualization Approach.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 78, Jan. 2018, pp. 98–112., www-sciencedirect-com.manowar.tamucc.edu/science/article/pii/S0747563217305186.

Pavelko, Rachelle L., and Jessica G. Myrick. “Muderinos and Media Effects: How the My Favorite Murder Podcast and Its Social Media Community May Promote Well-Being in Audiences with Mental Illness.” Journal of Radio & Audio Media, vol. 27, no. 1, 2020, pp. 151–169., doi: https://doi-org.manowar.tamucc.edu/10.1080/19376529.2019.1638925.

“Virtual communities and social media | Jim Rawson | TEDxAugusta” YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 9 Apr. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5txst5mOywM&t=271s.

Wrather, Kyle. “Making ‘Maximum Fun’ for Fans: Examining Podcast Listener Participation Online.” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, vol. 14, no. 1, Apr. 2016, pp. 43–63., doi:10.1386/rjao.14.1.43_1.