Origins of the faux-naif bloggy voice?

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.