Origins of the faux-naif bloggy voice?

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01548/dave-eggers-portra_1548020c.jpg

Thought for a second that was
http://media.salon.com/2012/04/segel_rectangle.jpg

looks like segel starcrossed w/jaymc

David Shapiro

eggers is literal vermin who needs to be exterminated

― 乒乓, Tuesday, 12 March 2013 20:20 (14 minutes ago) Permalink

:)

http://12thstreetonline.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/eee1.jpg

And This American Life, updating the performance-art detached/bemused Spalding Gray and Laurie Anderson.

there was some article that said it was DFW

eggers is literal vermin who needs to be exterminated

he should be spared for publishing The Instructions if nothing else.

vonnegut otm

the mcsweeney's tone has had an influence i guess but otherwise dave eggers is a meaningless person

i feel like ilx is always in danger of succumbing to this tone

Totally!

tumblr is the apotheosis of this, it is literally impossible to distinguish between any of the really cool kids on there because their writing style is all identical

i actually really liked heartbreaking work of... when i read it but i was about 13/14 at the time and who knows how annoying it would be if i read it now, i saw him giving a reading at the time when he was promoting you shall know our velocity and i spoke to him afterwards and he was really nice to me and my friend who was also like 14 and spent ages talking to me and i think he is probably a totally nice guy based on this but i have never read anything by him again and never actually think about him.

ur sentences are often very long

what an interesting question

im not really knowledgeable enough about "internet writing" in general to really have an idea of its origins, but i wonder if the function is possibility in some respects to too serve two simultaneous but yet opposed needs. it's flexible enough to genuinely provide the info on something while reflecting the absurdity of providing info on something so inconsequential/crazy/whatever. if you don't strike this tone just right then you're either doing academic criticism (which makes you vulnerable) or naively embracing something to the risk of being the object of fun yourself.

it's like having a point of view on something without actually, you know, having a point of view.

^^ this makes a lot of sense to me - it's finding the appropriate distance between a subject & the writer, right, in all sorts of ways. & it fits intothe whole generation-kneejerk-irony thing too, right. something that's often annoying about reading cultural comments on blogs is the showy tone of commenters, slipping into some kind of lazily superior expert register to project knowledge. & this seems like a similar thing, writing with enough of a sort of faux-patient/bemused tone as to separate oneself from the content you're generously going to unpack for everybody.

Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.

can someone link to some examples here

It's been too long since I've read Franny & Zooey for me to tell whether or not yr taking the piss for sure

http://mentholmountains.blogspot.ca/2011/11/new-worst-move-in-journalism-phoney.html

the new york times blamed david foster wallace, mostly, kinda

That little juke where the writer affects to hesitate over their next revelation because, well, it gives the next words a bit of artificial acceleration after the pause and alters the cadence and emphasis a bit, is most certainly an affectation, but it works, in a limited way and it is dead easy to use. It is just tiresome after a few exposures, as are most affectations.

u tuomas level faux naive posters in their own boar

it's funny the internet both hyper connected (anything you write is implicitly in conversation with and exposed to observation from literally every point of view) and hyper-isolated and specialized. i wonder if this type of writing exemplifies that dilemma because you could certainly say it's a "coded" language that addresses a certain context and thus a certain audience while at the exact same time knows it's "out there" in the wild west of the internet.

this is writing that could be seen in direct opposition to actually "naive" writing on the internet--the kind of stuff that, when it's exposed to discussion or observation at these wider levels, sorta surprises the author and catches them off guard, like they didn't know they were writing "on the internet."

eggers' twee style is certainly passe, but i think he should be judged on more than just heartbreaking. his work has become steadily more sober since that one. seems like he's aging gracefully imo. his charity/humanitarian work is also pretty impressive, i think, even though the branding for 826 is his verbose-twee style at its most insufferable.

on the topic of internet writing: i don't much care for the faux-naive affectations (although i have been guilty of using them myself) but can't be bothered to get upset over it. style fads happen. the goony ilx style, fwiw, can be p aggravating itself.

i don't think it's the goal to write without affectation, either. i'm sure there's some kind of civilized standard of writing restraint. i don't think it's necessarily a gold standard of perfectly plain writing.

the ", well," thing just reads to me really unconfident -- the same (possibly totally unfair, cuz it almost alone prevents me from really liking philip roth and he's a big deal right) reaction i have to italics, which seem to me like something you use when you doubt the ability of the structure of your sentence to itself suggest emphasis and focus. (plus with italics you're not suggesting at all: you're insisting. makes writing much less collaborative + thus less empathetic + thus less useful.) when you put in the "well" gulp it's like either you don't think you made your lil joke clearly enough or you don't think i'm smart enough to notice it without a highlighter.

it has rhythmic uses too obv but here's an idea: write a sentence that doesn't need to be artificially enrhythmed

also, i used to have a penpal who was into white-people lit-internet and would put lots of things in parentheses. pretty sure that's another hallmark of the faux-naif bloggy voice.

salinger comes from the benchley/perelman '30s new yorker wiseass tradition -- very different imo.

dfw feels like the right answer, but where did he get it from? delillo maybe?

discourse analysis to thread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysis

also i believe that we are talking about several different things here

* "faux naif bloggy voice" -- no idea what this is
* hedging -- the "well", the hiccups described above are, imo, classic hedges
* using parentheses to add information that is not necessary but that the writer wants to share (sometimes background info, sometimes an aside)
* the chronic informalization/increasingly conversational nature of journalistic writing (this is the one that burns me the most -- writing where the writer's voice is so strong that it overpowers the material being written about)
* whatever else y'all have in your minds that you are categorizing as this "white people lit internet" (?)

it has rhythmic uses too obv but here's an idea: write a sentence that doesn't need to be artificially enrhythmed

― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, March 13, 2013 1:31 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

never

also i swaer to you all i never read any nyt article abt this

this - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html?pagewanted=all

*gazes upon that article for the first time*

i don't mean this wholely critical, and i'm sort of loath to cite examples, b/c they're examples of writing I like if anything. part of why i associate an element of this with ilx is because its a very powerful critical stance to take. you are confronted with some densely constructed argument about some rock thing or why certain music is not good, or the nature of aesthetics more broadly, etc. and answer "but britney is great! everybody loves to dance to toxic!" and that's very hard to respond to.

there's a structure and a framing to how its used now, especially in regards to broader political/social commentary that feels especially new, but deploying exactly that sort of tactic.

on the other hand, i've also found its terribly abrasive to people that aren't used to it. like i sent a column on some economy-related commentary stuff to a friend and he was like 'why is this promoting anti-intellectualism and making fun of people being serious', when of course it was poking fun at pseudo-intellectualism and seriousness as a substitute for thought, etc., but because he was outside of the circle of people who know how to decipher this sort of writing, the layers of meaning just collapsed.

i think that part of this style of writing seems to come from recent college grads from liberal arts colleges who majored in the humanities - feels like that, anyway - idk, coming into your own during the 20s and having had to 'think critically' (what a chestnut!) about ~things~ and ~life~ makes you sort of realize just how insane and received everything we take for granted that we 'know' is - and once you position yourself outside of the morass of received knowledge - not even knowledge, received experience, intuition, worldview - ! and you adopt this tone of "i am just trying to think ~rationally~ about these interesting phenomena. and of course that's really kind of disingenuous, because what is rationality, even, at some subterranean level you are just doing a seinfeld 'what's the DeAL with women's advertising! lobsters! sports!' critique.

i think the crucial move that these writers make is inviting you to just step over and into their shoes, just for a moment, see through my eyes, the eyes of a naif! and let me guide you through the ways that this doesn't make sense. that move of empathy, of bridging a gap between the writer and the reader. which of course is its own horseshit because jeez the thing most unknowable is precisely that which lies outside your own empirical experience and which is only bruised at by reading somebody else's words. your own words, even! solipsism, the noumenal and the phenomenal.

it has rhythmic uses too obv but here's an idea: write a sentence that doesn't need to be artificially enrhythmed

― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, March 13, 2013 1:31 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

never

― 乒乓, Wednesday, March 13, 2013 9:46 AM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark

i realize this post would have been much funnier if i had italicized 'never', if only *sigh*

^^^like xp.

he should be judged on more than just heartbreaking. his work has become steadily more sober since that one.

off-topic but yeah, haven't read "heartbreaking" but have read "what is the what" and "hologram for the king" and both are extremely good novels, is this not a consensus view?

as for the original post, i read lots of blogs and don't understand what style is being referred to here though i'm sure i'm familiar with it, i too would like to see examples

good post dayo

keep it going, guys. i want something good to read today. what about klosterman? and murakami? are you guys gonna bring up wes anderson? and the people in the hyundai commercial? is it really an indie twee thing? what about all the question marks? so many? people not willing to commit? always hedging their bets? that's what i see a lot of on the internet? like they are afraid people are gonna make fun of them all the time. well either that or the blustery overconfident all caps thing. but blog-wise, there are too many unfinished thoughts. things not thought through well enough. thinking in public. but not in a good way. but also yeah actual examples would be nice. back up your work, sterl!

ukelele lit

fuck murakami btw

ha i was actually thinking that scott's posts superficially resemble a lot of what's being described here yet in my mind don't line up with the given examples AT ALL. i am at a loss to explain why, really.

I agree w/ dayo literarily itt

because scott is old maybe

can we get some examples of this? this thread is stupid.

scott i dont think of this as that sort of overly-precious or twee internet style of writing which is/was sort of like 90s/early 00s style of being on the internet when the internet wasnt really 'for everyone' the way it is now. the new style is probably in part a reaction to that early style of writing with the overuse of caps and exclamation points and the cartoonish asides and the self-conscious appropriation of urban slang (word!) but its also an attempt to seem certain in the face of overwhelming uncertainty and to seem reasonable in the face of terrifying unreasonableness.

what is "buckle up twitter"?!

A reference to the piece Fizzles posted. It's worth reading.

Yeah the writer of that piece uses it as shorthand for that abrasive hyper-cynical takedown tone, as in "buckle up twitter, I'm about to explain to you why Ulysses is a literal pile of used toilet paper!"

Strident and incurious and sarcasric and enraged

otm except i wouldn't say they're thinking about the reader at all, just the impenetrability of their own performance

Yeah I think that among the reasons why that tone is so insidious and popular is there’s a way that it weirdly flatters the readers ego bc it somehow makes you feel not like you are being shouted at, but that you are shouting along with the writer at some other third party

still don’t know if this is what flopson meant of if he was referring to the type of blogvoice that i used to write in because i can’t tell jokes and just want to be dull about what i think is right on x topic.

xpost yeah you're very very quickly on the inside of a knowledge-wielding club, with a model for how to wield it. may be just an innate side effect of wider and more rapid access to information --- expertise still takes a long time and a lot of engagement, while something slightly longer than a sound bite (but short enough to be memetic in the original sense) can be launched into the world with considerable ease.

it’s hard to wade into the online world without some kind of rhetorical armor

otm. but one's rhetorical strategy can be as simple as Trump's sixth grade taunting, accompanied by an invincible resistance to shame or self-doubt.

Twitticisms wear me out.

that "buckle up twitter" piece was so great to read, that style of writing is like nails on a chalkboard for me

i do enjoy twitter threads when they're written by actual historians, scientists, et al, in a calm and non-strident and thoughtful way

yeah it feels like there’s a tonal overlap between say sarah taber’s undoubtedly informed and informatively detailed agri-science threads and this style.

feels like people will imitate that style even where hard knowledge isn’t present. that does suggest a problem with the original tone. i note in that sarah taber thread: “Notice anything in common there?” and “That's why we call these areas "scrub".” both of which have that manner.

I think the “that’s why we” is significant. she means agri-science academics and professional agriculture inspectors. but the implication is “do you want to be a member of our knowledge club?”. that can be easily imitated without any knowledge.

the whole tone is one of “schooling” people.

What I also took away from that piece was the author’s dad seemed cool

Those types of “schooling” Twitter threads as a means of replacing a true deep dive into a new area of knowledge are to me the equivalent of those dumb fast speed, “camera pointed down” cooking videos of garbage food hacks for millennials I always see on Facebook and elsewhere.

i feel like a lot of people just aren't very good writers or particularly intelligent, and they don't compensate for these problems by doing a bunch of research. In the past, most of these people did not give the public the "benefit" of their voices. So, in a way, it's good, that more people have an outlet and can be heard. However, it's also like having to listen to the music of everyone who wants to be in a band.

buckle up seems to be an extension of vox-explainer voice. imho its a "we are the voice of facts and reason" sorta reaction to the current administration w/ a smug "serious people" vibe.

What ever happened to ironic quotation marks? Bloggers in the 2000s used to, like Derrida, write "under erasure" all the time, distancing themselves from concepts they mistrusted, or that they felt had a suspect provenance, or whatever. I believe I used to do this, but stopped for some reason. Others seem to have done this too.

Do people have less of an appetite for deconstruction than they once did?

I still do this. Old habits die hard.

Possibly replaced by Ironic Capitalization

ironic capitalization is Different imo

Or maybe it isn’t! But that’s fine.

Also voted puttanesca

And here’s why

Omg lol that also contained my vote on the sauce poll. I did vote puttanesca but it ruined my joke

idk i think it actually got even funnier

one weird trick to make your pasta bloggier... and that's okay

i think i decided at some point that all concepts are contentious so there was no point singling only some of them out with punctuation

True, true, but sometimes you need 'em for that extra 'do u see???' oomph.

The schooling voice seems precisely designed as a mighty weapon capable of clearing great swathes of open but infertile space. This tone shall not be policed because this tone goes to 11. Seems natural after an age of equivocation shaming (resisting urge to add a question mark there) - sub-thought - typing on phones now, with increasingly aggressive autocorrect, is making affected type/speech an actual effort.

n30*l33+ Sp0nG3BoB c0pY r3qU1rInG N3@rLy _3_ +!m3z @S L0nG +0 +yP3 @Nd n3g@+!nG !Tz PuRp0s3 !s @ g00D eX@mPl3 0F tH@+ pHeN0m3N0n

I wonder if part of the faux-naif bloggy voice is a reaction against the impenetrable academic voice that many of us were trained to use. People don't get taught in school how to write about specialized subjects in a straightforward, accessible, informal way, and if most of the nonfiction writing you've been doing is in the form of academic essays, it probably helps to have this standard blogging voice that signals, "I am chatting with a lay audience" that you can jump into.

the voice that drives me batty is the twitter hipster voice, it's predictable and repetitive and dull and yet speakers of this deeply unarcane tongue think it suffices as a shield to say the most outrageously callous dumbfuckery

one dril is enough is how i break it down to an extent and everyone else is doing the updated version of quoting austin powers all the time

Origins of the faux-naif bloggy voice? It's complicated.

what is the shared genealogy of this and american podcast voice?

Did anyone ever cite an actual example of this voice?

(I just read down the thread and couldn't really find one.)

We need to talk about the faux-naif bloggy voice

i feel like The Awl, as much as i loved it, was an early purveyor

Origins of the faux-naif voice? This blogger has Thoughts.