When I joined the Odyssey about a month ago, I also liked their Facebook page. Links to Odyssey articles began to show up in my newsfeed, and I quickly noticed a pattern.
See if you can spot it in the titles of these recently-shared articles:
What It’s Like Having A Paranoid Mind
Why Empathy Should Be The Most Important Value To Our Generation
What Does It Mean To Be Truly Vulnerable?
How The World Of #fitspo Is Ruining Our Self Worth
Besides all dealing with emotional well-being (which I did not notice until I saw them all together) all these titles promise an explanation. “It’s Okay Not To Be Okay” actually makes an assertion with its title, but such a simplistic statement obviously begs for explanation, which the author delivers “because sometimes we need to take time out for ourselves.” The others offer straightforward descriptions, either of personal experience or personal belief, ending with a call to action for the reader to adopt some new behavior or attitude.
This kind of literature (and yes, Internet articles fall under the category of literature) exists all over the Internet. YouTube channels like Crash Course, Seeker Daily, The School of Life, Veritasium and MinutePhysics all take on a didactic, explanatory tone.
News outlet Vox brands itself with the slogan “explain the news” and has a section on its site dedicated to “explainers,” containing articles and videos that, you guessed it, explain popular issues.
While explanatory literature might not be a completely new genre (how-to books have been around for ages, as have other instructional materials), its current popularity warrants attention.
On close examination, this literature’s tone falls somewhere between didactic and apologetic; apologetic not in the asking for forgiveness sense, but in the argumentative sense. Articles and videos from the sources mentioned above make a claim and then explain straightforwardly and unpretentiously why it is true.
They try to achieve this unassuming and agreeable tone in a very unfortunate way by explaining in the most unsophisticated, basic way possible (Remember, “It’s Okay Not To Be Okay… because sometimes we need to take time out for ourselves.”).
Why are these explanations worth publishing, reading and watching? Why are people interested in seeing issues dumbed down to a seventh-grade level?
While it’s very tempting to offer you my explanation here, I will resist the urge because the point of this article is not to explain, but to report something worthy of attention. And, unlike many of my fellow Internet content creators, I trust that you are intelligent and original enough to form your own explanations.
