Origins of the faux-naif bloggy voice?

or something. *submits post*

"sciencey stuff" was my least favorite line in the pareene thing but everything else was cathartically otm (again)

what i should be called out on wrt that "artificially enrhythmed" bullshit last night is my constant+notentirelyunconscious use of "like"

not that i expect people to like keep tabs on me that close i'm just saying i reread it and thought lol

Is the Tiger Beatdown/Wonkette style of comedy writing an ultra-exaggerated version of this voice, or its own beast? (Deliberately stilted/simple sentences! Exclamations marks! HERE IS A SENTENCE IN ALL CAPS, BECAUSE WHY NOT?)

― blatherskite, Wednesday, March 13, 2013 3:02 PM (42 minutes ago)

i assumed this is what the thread was about, but yeah people who write like this are terrible

that was the style that preceded the one were talking about

yeah i really can't stand that. i was fine w tiger beatdown for a while because it was the first place i'd seen it and it was novel and then it became the "ladyblog" voice and crept into the tone of writers i otherwise like and :/. i associate it w tumblr; idk if that's on point or anything.

Beats. Bush-era. Simpsons. Irony. Every. Time.

Faux-naive vs. Shocked, shocked.

Really the only pleasure in any of this is twofold: seeing who adopts this voice (esp late adopters) and trying to figure out why and 2) seeing who resists the adoption of this voice and trying to figure out why

who are the joiners/nonjoiners, basically.

yeah i'll take all of this over the moral shock + lurid sneer of fox-style tabloid reporting. xp

what about ned always being speechless on facebook all the time everytime he posts a wacky link. where does that fit in. lol love the ned.

speechless...

*youtube video of an otter farting*

what about people who preface everything they say with a disclaimer: "you know i like ____, but [outrageous thing about _____]"

i love that -- the people who do it always do it so reliably!

choire sicha is the origin of this bloggy voice

hes drawing on dfw but its basically him, hes the guy

he also does it better than anyone

is he the new pope

Is the Tiger Beatdown/Wonkette style of comedy writing an ultra-exaggerated version of this voice, or its own beast? (Deliberately stilted/simple sentences! Exclamations marks! HERE IS A SENTENCE IN ALL CAPS, BECAUSE WHY NOT?)

this is the pre-2003 version of internet writing i think i said this already

do you guys actually read lots of blogs? or have favorites. in 2013. i never look at them unless someone links to some dumb/outraged thing. the outrage of the day. the dumbness of the day. i don't even know why i look at those. i got some old journal of popular culture mags from the 70's the other day and they were very entertaining. and i went on the website of that mag and every single recent article is either about vampires, zombies, or superheroes. almost. or reality t.v. i am sure they are getting bushels of essays on the show Girls as we speak. there is a singlemindedness to mod pop cult discourse and it just seems so samey and zeitgeist-y to the max. i dunno. lol.

i'm sure academic types see the same stuff all the time too. the same zombie essays over and over. zombies and consumer culture, blah, blah. its all so fucking american too. i need to broaden my horizons. those 70's mags had all kinds of weird shit in them.

Well not per se, but there are so many sites that blur the lines now -- blogazines like HuffPo and Gawker, mainstream news sites with some bloggy content, etc.

RIP journalism ;_;

Blogs replaced the unnecessary middleman, then became the unnecessary middleman themselves.

“Edith Wharton Meets Aquaman: The Glimpses of the Moon and Imperiled Male Culture in Entourage” by Donna Campbell

“Failure to Launch: Not-So-Superheroes in Gravity’s Rainbow and Superfolks” by Megan Condis

“The Accidental Supermom: Superheroines and Maternal Performativity, 1963-1980” by Laura Mattoon D’Amore

“The Female Link: Citation and Continuity in Watchmen” by Erin M. Keating

“Terror in Horror Genres: The Global Media and the Millennial Zombie” by Nicole Birch-Bayley

“Forged in Love and Death: Problematic Subjects in The Vampire Diaries” by Mary Bridgeman

“The Sand/wo/man: The Unstable Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series” by Ally Brisbin and Paul Booth

“Remembering Why We Once Feared the Dark: Reclaiming Humanity Through Fantasy and in Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II” by Tony M. Vinci.

sorry, that was just a little comic relief. doesn't really belong here. stuff from that mag i was talking about. i'm so sick of superheroes. and vampires. probably will always love zombies despite the overload.

there is a singlemindedness to mod pop cult discourse and it just seems so samey and zeitgeist-y to the max.

yes

I read that as "to max"

pop cult journal doesn't mess around:

Essays should range between fifteen and twenty-five pages of double-spaced text in 12 pt Times New Roman font, including all images, endnotes, and Works Cited pages. Please note that the fifteen page minimum should be fifteen pages of written article material. Less than fifteen pages of written material will be rejected and the author asked to develop the article further. Essays should also be written in clear US English in the active voice and third person, in a style accessible to the broadest possible audience. Authors should be sensitive to the social implications of language and choose wording free of discriminatory or sexist overtones.

what do people think distinguishes the ladyblog voice in particular?

outrage?

bombeckian bombast?

CAPITAL LETTERS REFLECTING EMOTIONAL RESONANCE RATHER THAN EXTREME ~EMOTING~.

RETICENCE, I MEAN, OF COURSE. :/

plus a smidge of Sally Forth-like whatareyagonnadoamirite?

http://thebrightblush.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/photo-30.jpg

And The Mouth-Twitch of Young Women in the Late 2000s and Early 2010s

who is that? WS, but in more of a would-curl-up-and-watch-a-movie-with way.

wow, this thread sure took a turn

http://www.edyoungblog.com/files/2012/02/Dr.-Drew.jpg

^^ a man about to give us A Frank Appraisal.

turned into a sausage fest in here

Sterling you do realize that all three examples you linked at 1:25 were written by people who work/worked at Gawker, right?

Oh OK Max already pointed out that Choire is the source. Carry on.

i figured gawker was a key part of the nexus (i mean lots and lots of current bloggy things are tied to the ex-gawker diaspora), but didn't read it/pay attention at all in the whole formative period, so good to know that there's an actual person this goes back to. although i would like to think back all the earlier little mag on the web experiments and think which generation of those writers probably had an influence here (suck had a difft voice, but maybe some _parts_ of suck presaged this?)

I think there's a strong anxiety element to the whole thing - an underlying fear, maybe subconscious in some cases, of seeming dull, not with it, overly self-serious, a relic of the print era, etc. if you don't at least make a nod to that style.

that's the power of the in crowd
that's why i am interested in late adopters and bloggy voice teetotalers

is lindy west a good exemplar of the ladyblog voice? http://jezebel.com/people/lindywest

maybe. i find her writing distractingly cluttered with jokes and references that cloud her (often very good) points. if that's what you mean, then yes.

i read her pope thing. its like if musto and taibbi had a sassy bloggy baby. i think people like stuff like that though. they must. there is a lot of it. half gossip column + half fuck you.

I enjoy it in small doses, at least in the hands of someone who can pull it off, like Sady Doyle. Otherwise, it seems like a bad pastiche. All the stylistic boxes are ticked, but it falls flat, like reading anyone's attempt to mimic, say, PG Wodehouse or Hunter Thompson etc.

hi

This is all really interesting but I don't think I know what blog / voice is / was actually meant!

With DFW the big tendency was I think to mix in a lot of technicality and grammatical precision with a lot of informality at the same time. I think other US writers do this also. But I don't think this is naif ... ?