That's an interesting analysis, although perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that I can hardly sit through a minute of any of those YouTube voices linked in the article. I find the pacing and "bubbliness" exhausting, and the tone bordering on patronizing.<p>And yet I find some "Internet personalities" very interesting to listen to, and they're mostly from podcasts. Dave Chen from slashfilmcast.com is a favorite of mine (and yes, I miss Adam Quigley's voice). Many NPR shows (which I listen to in podcast format) are obvious examples.<p>In fact, the voices really make or break podcasts for me. I never made it past the first 15 minutes of Serial, because I just couldn't sit through the host's voice (clearly this is not a common opinion).
> Overstressed vowels: A lot of the time, people are lazy about pronouncing certain vowels—they’re un-emphasized and neutral, and just sort of hang loosely in the middle of the mouth, making an “euh” sound, regardless of which vowel it actually is.<p>Here's a funny notion. Perhaps in modern American English (at least the midwest accent), perhaps many of the vowels have <i>actually</i> become schwas and it's only the historic nature of the orthography that makes us think they should be something else. There's no vowel that sounds like the schwa naturally, but it's clearly a "missing" letter in the modern alphabet since it's also the most common vowel sound in American English. So every other vowel ends up being pronounceable as a schwa in various contexts.<p>Strangely, most people who use the schwa vowel regularly make a specific point to pronounce other key marker vowels correctly in order to distinguish the words, the rest of the vowels are unimportant to distinguish.<p>Imagine how much better English orthography would be if we could just use an 'ə' everyplace an unstressed vowel existed.
The biggest think I've noticed is that many of these vlog-style youtube videos are the video equivalent of the wall of text.<p>The edit out all of the silence between sentences, as if they've never heard of full stops or paragraphs.<p>Perhaps their audience will get bored if they aren't continually being bombarded by inanity.
I’m surprised that the article doesn’t mention Ze Frank, since he was the originator of this style of speech in online videos, or at least very influential in popularising it.
This is increasingly common all over YouTube, and I've been noticing at university in presentations. The pauses seem unnatural and there is a lot of emphasis in strange parts of sentences.<p>Although I enjoy the content, CGPGrey (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey</a>) uses this a lot and it is ever present in educational type YouTube channels.