Tag: tumblr

Tempest in a Tumblr

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Image

There is absolutely nowhere in the world for righteous anger than Tumblr. That tweet up there? That ignited the Tumblr equivalent of a firestorm. My dash was filled by reblogs of this post by thisiswhiteprivilege.tumblr:

To David Karp [creator and CEO of Tumblr] and all of those who work under the Support Staff:

You are all misogynist, racist, homophobic trash—every single one of you. And David? Yeah, you, David Karp. You need to make some changes.

The post continues with a mixed list of grievances ranging from legitimate disagreements about how the site is moderated (requiring users to block other users that they find abusive vs. proactively censuring user) to a pretty thin misreading of a two year old blog post (it may be stupid, but David Karp asking “Can I use the word “nigga” if I’m quoting a song?” is in no way the same as:

“3.) After all of this, you, a white man have the nerve to ask, “It’s okay if I say the n word, right?” (Spoiler alert: NO IT ISN’T, because it’s a fucking racial slur, you racist fuckface.)

Let’s take a minute to think about that one. David Karp thinks people using racial slurs at people of color is acceptable, thinks people of color responding with justified anger is hate speech, and then has the nerve to ask if he can use one of said slurs himself.”

to taking offense at a couple of statements made not by David Karp, but by a parody account (identified as such in the bio section), @DavidKrap (source of the screenshot above). So basically the “open letter” post is conservatively 80% bullshit, and works against whatever changes thisiswhiteprivilege wants to bring to the platform.

It’s also just pure Tumblr.

It goes almost without saying that the restraints created by the design of a social platform shape the way that its users interact. Facebook has traditionally been very good at semi-private, horizontal interactions between users, not so much for broadcasting or keeping in touch with those outside the walled garden. Twitter’s 140 character limit. Traditional blogs’ comment sections. And Tumblr’s design choices have made it a platform that anybody can access but is extremely limited in user interaction.

Tumblogs are like a parody of Web 2.0, WordPress or Blogger or Typepad-powered blogs (although WordPress has made huge changes in the last year to bring it closer to the Tumblr model). Every user has a URL that can be used to navigate to a public-facing page. Every user can set their own design. But spend any time on the site, and you can see how different a beast it is.

There is no way to comment on a post, except by “reblogging*” and appending your own text. Actually, “liking” (which adds a comment: “____ liked this” to the bottom of the post) and reblogging are the only ways that users can interact at all (this becomes very annoying. My dashboard (90% of any user’s time on Tumblr will be at http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard; nobody sees that custom theme you spent a couple hours deciding on) is constantly filled with the same posts, reblogged to add a comment). Thus reblogging becomes the social focus of the site. This is summed up well by a Quora user answering the question, “How do teenagers waste hours upon hours consuming Tumblr? My 15-year old daughter wastes hours upon hours everyday mindlessly scrolling rapidly through her “endless” tumblr stream. She also brags about her own blog on tumblr and how much love it gets, but it doesn’t contain any original content (only reblogs). I don’t understand.”:

Reblogging is a great and made-easy way to define my newly-established online self. It is how I quickly pass along the things that I care about and keep my followers interested in my blog. Despite it not consisting of all-original content, my blog is the equivalent of making a portfolio to sum myself up. I spend much time and care making my blog unique and look good.

My followers rely on me for discovery, as I rely on the people I follow. So, I feel responsible for doing just this; not doing so would run the risk of me losing followers, which will impact the amount of users who see my original content when I choose to write something myself or post a photo of mine or a video I found. So as I am browsing my feed for hours and hours, I am also looking for things that I think my followers would be interested in, like to see, or content that would go nicely given the other stuff on my blog. And, yeah, it is endless, which only increases the amount of time I spend on the site (the scrolling is set up so that as I near the bottom, more content loads). And I see it as crucial that I search through everything in my feed since my last visit to Tumblr, as I wouldn’t want to miss anything potentially interesting (that may make good blogging material or just suits my own interests).

What this means in practice is that Tumblr functions as a parody of conspicuous consumption: where everything costs nothing and goes on infinitely. Images and reblogs become the ways to signal your education, or your hipness, or your personality. And ultimately it shows everything but you.

But its greatest sins are in obscuring the chain of information. Whenever you reblog, you have the option of removing attribution to a previous user. This can mean that it’s very confusing to find the original post that another user might be quoting. Because reblogging is the only way to make a comment, there’s no linear order to comments & users can fork a conversation at any point**. Furthermore, while there are tools to embed URLS and captions to images, most tumblr users are very bad about attributing images. I’m not even talking about getting permission from artists, simply crediting them by name. While traditional blogs may be less sharey/social (if you want to discuss this article, you have to make a comment on this page and keep checking back to follow the discussion***), there is more interactivity with the information. All of the links I’ve embedded in the post allow you to go back and disagree with my interpretations. And I think it makes this a more durable platform.

If it seems like I’m dumping on the platform: don’t worry. I’m completely addicted to Tumblr.

The signal to noise ratio is crazy low, don’t get me wrong. But what I find irresistible about the platform is that when people do actually write original posts, when they write about their own feelings or opinions, users of Tumblr have absolutely no filter. And so more than any other place on the internet, if you want to hear how people feel about being mixed race, or people who have scoliosis, or people who were raised fundamentalists, there is no better place to look then on those Tumblr tags. When users give themselves permission to be themselves, they’re completely themselves.

And that’s why I keep coming back.

My tumblr can be found at sauntodo.tumblr.com

*a phrase which I find–frankly–a contradiction in terms. 

**In a hilarious, “This is supposed to be Web 3.0?” twist, these comments are displayed with c. 1998-chain-letter carats >>>.

***and, by the way, please do. 


Tumblr, Poetry, and the Structuring of Experience

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Ma Yuan (active ca. 1190–1225). Viewing Plum Blossoms by Moonlight. Fan mounted as an album leaf; ink and color on silk; 25.1 x 26.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art

This last year, I had the privilege of taking a year-long course in Chinese Humanities, studying the literature, philosophy and history of the Qin/Han and Song dynasties for a semester each. One of the hallmarks of a Reed College education is the introductory humanities class (Hum 11o) that is required of all entering students and functions as an interdisciplinary writing seminar and common point of reference for Reed students. Hum 110 surveys Greek and Roman studies, with detours through Egyptian, Jewish and early Christian texts. The humanities model continues in upper level classes with medieval (Hum 210) and Early Modern/Enlightenment (Hum 220) studies.

Chinese Humanities, Hum 230, is an attempt to take that same model and apply it to Chinese studies. The first semester focuses on the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BC-220 AD) in order to look at the birth of the Chinese state and the rise of Confucianism, and the second semester focuses on the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD), which has remarkable parallels with early modern Europe (and, indeed, our own time). The course is taught by a team of lecturers and conference leaders, with a mixture of language experts, historians, art historians, and Chinese literature professors. I was speaking with one of our visiting professors, a modern China specialist, and he remarked that Reed’s program was unique in teaching this material in this way.

I came into the course with very little knowledge of China, ancient or modern, and one of the things that impressed me constantly was just how old the literary tradition of the country is. The stability of the Chinese literary canon, and the cultural emphasis and importance of the written word through such a long history is unparalleled by any culture the world has ever seen.

One fascinating manifestation of this tradition is functional poetry from the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD). The poetry from this period was so vibrant and masterful that it was held up as a model for the next thousand years. Some of the most charming of these poems were simply mementos of a visit from a friend, or written to preserve the memory of an arresting vista, or even left at the door to show that one had visited while the master of the house was out. For example, this poem, “Visiting and Old Friend at His Farmhouse” by Meng Haoran, is a simple poem that captures the bliss of friendship, conversation, and the comfort of the countryside:

An old friend prepared a meal of chicken and rice,
And invited me to join him at his farmhouse.
The village is surrounded by green trees
And the pale blue of outlying mountains.
The window opens to the garden and field,
While holding wine in our hands, we talked of mulberry and hemp.
We are looking forward to the Autumn Festival,
when I will return to visit the chrysanthemum bloom.

All of this is a very circumspect way to get at the singular pleasure that maintaining a Tumblr blog has given me in the past few months.

When I first encountered this blogging platform, I was convinced that it was not for me. It was first established as an image sharing service, and several aspects of it’s design and use are still a product of that function. It places an emphasis on sharing and reblogging over content creation, text-only posts are awkward, and the traditional blogger-commentator dialogue is unwieldy. Tumblr’s fluidity of display can also be a bewildering experience. Reading posts in Tumblr’s dashboard or arranging posts by tags is more akin to reading Facebook’s news feed than a traditional blog, and the infinite scrolling functionality can give the impression that one is wading through an infinite stream of consciousness rather than a deliberate arrangement of thought. As someone with more of a traditional bent than most of my age, the lack of constancy was frustrating.

As I’ve explored the service, however, and especially through my efforts to take a photograph each day, I’ve come to appreciate Tumblr less as a platform for artistic or personal expression and more as a tool for ordering and preserving subjective experience. The process of being aware of my surroundings, of constantly looking out for that moment or view with which I will represent my day has made me more engaged with myself. There is no question that it took more intellectual engagement and artistic technique for the Tang poets to preserve their own experience in verse, however I think they are at heart the same response to the same impulse. And in the way that a poet’s body of work became a literary avatar for the poet’s experience, so have my photos become a digital avatar for my own life, my own mind.

The internet confronts us constantly with the knowledge of just how unspecial we are, just how common our experiences and thoughts are. As a response, we look inward. Everyone is special. Everyone is unique. It just takes a little more effort to find what those special qualities and unique perspectives are. I think the internet has made us more aware, as a global culture, of the value of those with a compelling and unusual point of view.

This is why I can never take seriously the charge that my generation is a narcissistic generation of navel-gazers. We have become a culture unstuck in time, where the products of culture grow ever more available: streaming audio of every record ever made, online archives of writing, television, etc. In such a culture, the only thing that can be truly cultivated is one’s own artistic efforts and the lens that you view art through.

This blog is a lot more “serious” than my Tumblr, which can be found at iconochasm.tumblr.com. I usually try and keep the projects separate, however I’ve become lately convinced of the futility of segregating one’s online life.