by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Vox, that pillar of Twitter Liberal conventional wisdom, never ceases to get on my fucking nerves. Since I don’t write for Vox, this is not going to be a blog post that meets the metrics of a successful “thought leader” in Manhattan. I’m just going to ramble off the top of my head from my general impression of the site.
First, one thing that is amusing is the “received English” of the people who do their videos. No normal English speaker uses the very specific diction combined with a deep speaking voice of these Vox people. Add to it a somewhat sing-songy lilt to it all and it grows very grating on my nerves. There’s something smug and organically condescending about this received English. It makes me think to myself, “This is why we got Trump.” I’m extremely empathetic to Vox and they still manage to make me want to scream at the top of my lungs that nothing’s right or wrong, but thinking makes it so.
Then there are the Vox Website posts. Their authors seem determined to drain any sort of humanity out of whatever it is they’re covering. It’s all about the metrics of identity politics, or “slaying the patriarchy” telling me that there is some sort of neo-liberal received truth that I have to believe. I’m still smarting from their post about tropes used in fiction. In my imagination, the writer of the post was a 26-year-old graduate of Bard College who got the gig because her parents knew someone. Ugh. So frustrating.
The hits keep coming.
Just recently, I heard from Vox’s media critic that pretty much all comedy in the Trump Era is shit and there’s only one Twitter comic that we we’re allowed to think is funny. It’s all very strange to me. Vox goes to extreme lengths to shit on any type of mainstream fun. I guess that’s their thing, but it still annoys me to no end.
It’s sites like Vox that make me want to start my own Website like Gawker. But, sadly, I think the days organic growth for a Website are long, long over. Twitter now serves the function that Gawker once did. The Web is a mature medium now.
