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tumblr: A Eulogy
Dec. 9th, 2018 08:39 amIt took me a long time to love tumblr. Even now, as the site withers away after severing itself from its fertile lifestream, I am laughing my ass off.
tumblr was the website that made me hook my modem up to one of those automatic security light timers and plug that in to a power outlet behind my couch. If fanfiction was Internet heroin, tumblr was Internet methamphetamine. There was ALWAYS something new. ALWAYS a journal someone had updated (because that's how you use tumblr when you refuse to make an account there for two years, you just flick from suggested web address to suggested web address in your browser bar. Which means I got to appreciate everybody's themes.) When I finally signed myself up and started following people, HOLY COW there's now an hour's worth of posts to scroll through twice a day.
And that's all I did, pretty much. Scroll, reblog. Scroll, scroll, like.
Posting on tumblr, you wonder: is anyone listening? Is anyone there? There is all this activity, but it never touches me! Perhaps it never will. It is alienating and disinhibiting. tumblr has been described as "screaming into the void" and the void every now and then screams back.
tumblr served no pragmatic function well. It is difficult to search through and find old posts you have tagged, impossible to organize them without reading them in their whole as a mess of pictures and colors. It is impossible to carry out a rational conversation -- but easy for waves of enthusiasm or hatred to sweep across the entire tumblr network. Easy to share pictures of missing children, inevitably lacking the dates they went missing. Easy to share rumors, lies, wickedly clever fan-comics. Your money, power, or righteousness mean nothing on tumblr: only virality.
tumblr was the id of the Internet. A great subconscious continually boiling with irrational passions. An asocial social network.
I find it strange, and beautiful, that with the demise of tumblr, users are turning to far more social and accountable forums to keep in contact: chatrooms. Dreamwidth. Pillowfort. Twitter. Possibly Mastodon or novel platforms. We have managed to form social bonds in an architecture that is actively hostile to conversation.
tumblr was an interesting phenomenon that was totally unlike anything Fandom had access to before. It was an absolute boon to fanartists and vidders and it provided the most mindlessly addictive Internet experience I have ever had, for good or ill. I hope we take the strengths of tumblr into account when shaping new platforms for pseudonymous social activity.
tumblr was the website that made me hook my modem up to one of those automatic security light timers and plug that in to a power outlet behind my couch. If fanfiction was Internet heroin, tumblr was Internet methamphetamine. There was ALWAYS something new. ALWAYS a journal someone had updated (because that's how you use tumblr when you refuse to make an account there for two years, you just flick from suggested web address to suggested web address in your browser bar. Which means I got to appreciate everybody's themes.) When I finally signed myself up and started following people, HOLY COW there's now an hour's worth of posts to scroll through twice a day.
And that's all I did, pretty much. Scroll, reblog. Scroll, scroll, like.
Posting on tumblr, you wonder: is anyone listening? Is anyone there? There is all this activity, but it never touches me! Perhaps it never will. It is alienating and disinhibiting. tumblr has been described as "screaming into the void" and the void every now and then screams back.
tumblr served no pragmatic function well. It is difficult to search through and find old posts you have tagged, impossible to organize them without reading them in their whole as a mess of pictures and colors. It is impossible to carry out a rational conversation -- but easy for waves of enthusiasm or hatred to sweep across the entire tumblr network. Easy to share pictures of missing children, inevitably lacking the dates they went missing. Easy to share rumors, lies, wickedly clever fan-comics. Your money, power, or righteousness mean nothing on tumblr: only virality.
tumblr was the id of the Internet. A great subconscious continually boiling with irrational passions. An asocial social network.
I find it strange, and beautiful, that with the demise of tumblr, users are turning to far more social and accountable forums to keep in contact: chatrooms. Dreamwidth. Pillowfort. Twitter. Possibly Mastodon or novel platforms. We have managed to form social bonds in an architecture that is actively hostile to conversation.
tumblr was an interesting phenomenon that was totally unlike anything Fandom had access to before. It was an absolute boon to fanartists and vidders and it provided the most mindlessly addictive Internet experience I have ever had, for good or ill. I hope we take the strengths of tumblr into account when shaping new platforms for pseudonymous social activity.
