Origins of the faux-naif bloggy voice?

i either write like that or write like fred rogers when i'm trying to discuss an issue

i go into dry and humorless mode mostly so i can avoid invective, which there's far too much of about. my sense of humor is often cruel. also, frankly, i seldom have the opportunity to try and make a reasoned argument, because there's seldom a fucking point to doing so these days. so it's a good way of keeping in practice so that my already dodgy reasoning skills don't atrophy completely.

i prefer writing in fred rogers mode but it's hard.

pa

can someone help me pin down why i can’t stand the tone of online writing (fka blogging) in 2019?

everything i read seems longwinded, didactic, lots of unnecessary exposition, humourless, lawerly argumentation

i don’t think it’s faux naif blogger voice anymore (can’t remember if it was a good thing or bad... i do miss the gawker voice)

can someone help me pin down why i can’t stand the tone of online writing (fka blogging) in 2019?

everything i read seems longwinded, didactic, lots of unnecessary exposition, humourless, lawerly argumentation

i don’t think it’s faux naif blogger voice anymore (can’t remember if it was a good thing or bad... i do miss the gawker voice)

lol imagine 'reading' in 2019 when you could be neurally juuling in augmented reality

― lumen (esby), Friday, June 7, 2019 1:27 AM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

exactly. the faux naif voice ultimately was a literary technique, even if it was one you hated. it was about leaving space for uncertainty, and in this way reflecting the experience of thinking rather than just instantly jumping into "takes."

the internet moves too fast now, and is too paranoid and full of ill will, for this kind of approach to survive. "buckle up twitter" maybe has some residual cutesy quality but it's still just full on attack mode.

i mean, sometimes what was called the "faux naif bloggy voice" was used for being passive aggressive, but i think setting yourself up as an innocent contemplating the wild west of american culture is like a definitely literary trope. you can probably trace it to the "new journalists" of the 60s

The blustery faux-nihilism of ‘buckle up twitter’ and the bloggy faux-naïf voice of yore both strike me as two sides of the same coin - techniques by insecure writers of performing candor and ‘realness’ while actually keeping the reader at a safe distance

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

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

I might be mixing up the faux naif voice with alt lit and the earlier new sincerity. The kind of like 2008 jezebel voice was insider-y and maybe a little different.

Faux naif in my sense was schtick but a less abrasive one than like the screaming style of 2019 social media

OeO/BN otm

what are we calling ‘buckle up twitter’?

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.

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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.