Neutral voice

[jere7my]

I heard a linguist talking about blogs on NPR this morning. He wasn't opposed to them, but criticized them for not having a "neutral voice," like newspapers have. This, he argued, makes them less universally accessible. I'm a bit shocked that a linguist would propose something as ludicrous as a "neutral voice". All right: proper grammar, declarative sentences, a certain shared vocabulary lead to greater accessibility, but I think what he was really saying was this: "I've grown up with newspapers, so none of their stylistic quirks leap out at me. I did not grow up with blogging, so their informal tone [which he referred to as 'dinner-table'] strikes me as odd." His implication that blogs share a common voice is similarly striking; if anything, the decentralization of information that has come with the net has produced a profusion of styles. I view this as a good thing; while any one blog might exclude any given person, the totality is more all-inclusive than the standard journalistic mode.

Comments

[uncleamos]

If you have all day to read them.

Not that I disagree, I'm just nitpicking.

Silly Linguist

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

Blogs are for kids ;o).

And kids at heart, of course.

This piece?

[(Anonymous)]

Was it this piece (http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/lunchroom.html) by Geoffrey Nunberg? Mr. Nunberg has some issues and concerns with blogs, and he's been on about them for some time. I suspect that his preoccupation with blogs made his say something he doesn't actually mean about newspapers, to wit:
"The high, formal style of the newspaper op-ed page may be nobody's native language, but at least it's a neutral voice that doesn't privilege the speech of any particular group or class."
instead of something like
'Anybody can learn to read a newspaper op-ed page, and once learned, newspaper style doesn't change rapidly enough to cause confusion, nor do different newspapers have sufficiently different styles to alienate readers who have just moved to town, particularly middle-aged readers.'
And where you inferred that (Mr. Nunberg thinks) blogs share a common voice, I inferred that (Mr. Nunberg thinks) successful blogs share a common voice, and by successful he's referring to "blogs like Altercation, Instapundit, Matthew Yglesias, Talking Points or Doc Searls." Which do have a sort of blogstyle, I think, and he's right to point out that they "address their readers -- not as anonymous citizens, the way print columnists do, but as co-conspirators who are in on the joke." Which they are, of course.

All of which is to say, I agree that what he actually said was shocking, but I suspect he misstated his point, and that his actual point is, well, also wrong, but in a different way. He's an interesting guy; I always have fun trying to articulate why I disagree with him...
... of course, if that wasn't the article you meant, then, er, never mind.

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian (http://www.kith.org/vardibidian/journal/).

Re: This piece?

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Yes! That is the piece exactly; thanks. I heard only the last half of it, and that while I was attempting to open sleep-gummed eyes (mine), so I missed the bit where he mentions specific blogs. The article as a whole is less irksome than the last half (with comprehension rising from zero to perhaps 2/3 as time progressed); I agree with you that he did not say what he meant to say, and that what he meant to say is somewhat less wrong. (He says, at one point, "three million Americans have tried their hands at blogging, and sometimes there seem to be almost that many variants of the form." So there goes half my complaint.)

He does irk me a bit more via a footnote—he says that blogs exclude 90% of web users (which confused me when I heard it), which really means "The Pew study found that 11% of Internet users have read
the blogs or diaries of other Internet users." That's not exclusionary; blogs are free, and widely available, unlike many newspapers. Does the NYT "exclude" the N% of Americans who've never read it?

In sum, though, it sounds a bit like Perry Como complaining about a Beatles concert—"I don't get this. Why the guitars? How can they expect to sing Some Enchanted Evening with that combo? Where's the conductor?" People who aren't in on the joke will always feel left out, but there are plenty of people who feel the NYT is too highbrow/left-leaning/snooty, and I imagine they've felt left out for a long time.

He makes the comment "Not that there's anything wrong with chewing over the events of the day with the other folks at the lunch table, but you hope that everybody in the room is at least reading the same newspapers at breakfast." That's pretty revealing, I think; in his world, perhaps everyone does read the same newspapers at breakfast. That's not my world; that's not the world of the urban Filipino youth; that's not the world of the Kansas farmer. His default world is white middle-to-upper class intellectual, and that certainly "isn't a language that everybody in the cafeteria is equally adept at speaking."

Re: This piece?

[(Anonymous)]

The Perry Como line is perfect; I may well steal it. The thing is, Geoffrey Nunberg is fascinated by blogs, he really wants to analyze them, but he's missing an awful lot, and he knows he is, and I'm not sure what he'll be able to do about it.

...and the reading the same newspapers line is really regrettable. Aren't we left-wing intelligentsia types suppose to be brimming with nostalgia for the days when there were umpty-'leven daily newspapers in New York?

R.I.,
-V.