The Old Man and the Screen

TTB: metadiscourse

Of course, how could I ignore the obvious one?

In my narrow focus on the latest trend on the Bearblogs Trending Page I failed to mention the overarching big narrative play I have encountered so far: metadiscourse.

What’s that?

In philosophy of language, metadiscourse is the discussion about a discussion, as opposed to a simple discussion about a given topic. Wikipedia

What is the most trendy of all trends?
Of course it is blogging about blogging!1

Most post, including the ā€œwriting motivationā€ kind, found on the Trending page fit well into the metadiscourse category:

It seems that given the option to upvote something, a comunity of bloggers is predominantly interested in blogging itself - sounds obvious, but it isn’t.

It’s not obvious because there are many, many other communities out there that employ some kind of voting = trending system and I would argue the norm in those is not metadiscourse2.

So why it is so in Bearblogs?
Maybe that guy that told all of us we are boring af and then ragequit was on to something?
I’m yet to see an answer, but I’m starting to sort my thoughts, and that’s always helpful.

Till next time, bye.


  1. The irony of this post and the TTB series squarely fitting the category is not lost on me

  2. Unless they are self-referential in nature: HackerNews is a developer comunity talking about software development, same for Lobsters or a topic oriented subreddit.

#TTB #metadiscourse