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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
Launched in 2007, tumblr became a safe haven for LGBT youth, social justice movements, and a counseling station for mental health issues. For a decade, this micro-blogging platform had more users than either Twitter or Snapchat, but it remained an obscure subculture for nonusers.
Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin offer the first systematic guide to tumblr and its crucial role in shaping internet culture. Drawing on a decade of qualitative data, they trace the prominent social media practices of creativity, curation, and community-making, and reveal tumblr’s cultlike appeal and position in the social media ecosystem. The book demonstrates how diverse cultures can – in felt and imagined silos - coexist on a single platform and how destructive recent trends in platform governance are. The concept of “silosociality” is introduced to critically re-think social media, interrogate what kinds of sociality it affords, and what (unintended) consequences arise.
This book is an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as anyone interested in an influential but overlooked platform.
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Seitenzahl: 407
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction: tumblr, with a small t
Notes
1 tumblr structure
Notes
2 tumblr sociality
Notes
3 fame
Notes
4 fandom
Notes
5 social justice
Notes
6 NSFW
Notes
7 mental health
Notes
Conclusion: “beautiful hellsite”
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
1 tumblr structure
Pages
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Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym,
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
, 2nd edition
Taina Bucher,
Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle,
The Internet of Things
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green,
YouTube
, 2nd edition
Mark Deuze,
Media Work
Andrew Dubber,
Radio in the Digital Age
Quinn DuPont,
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Charles Ess,
Digital Media Ethics
, 3rd edition
Jordan Frith,
Smartphones as Locative Media
Gerard Goggin,
Apps: From Mobile Phones to Digital Lives
Alexander Halavais,
Search Engine Society
, 2nd edition
Martin Hand,
Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan,
The Information Society
Tim Jordan,
Hacking
Graeme Kirkpatrick,
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin,
Leah A. Lievrouw,
Alternative and Activist New Media
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner,
Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan,
Digital War Reporting
Dhiraj Murthy,
, 2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi,
A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Julian Thomas, Rowan Wilken and Ellie Rennie,
Wi-Fi
Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin,
tumblr
Jill Walker Rettberg,
Blogging
, 2nd edition
Patrik Wikström,
The Music Industry
, 3rd edition
tumblr
Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin 2021
The right of Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4108-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4109-6(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tiidenberg, Katrin, author. | Hendry, Natalie Ann, author. | Abidin, Crystal, author.
Title: Tumblr / Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin.
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2021. | Series: Digital media and society series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003003 (print) | LCCN 2021003004 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509541089 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509541096 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509541102 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Tumblr (Electronic resource) | Microblogs--United States--History. | Microblogs--Social aspects. | Online social networks--United States--History.
Classification: LCC TK5105.8885.T85 T55 2021 (print) | LCC TK5105.8885.T85 (ebook) | DDC 338.7/613022314--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003003
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003004
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by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
Studying tumblr used to be a lonely endeavor, so first and foremost we thank our friends in the research community, who supported the development of our ideas and worked with us on fieldwork and thinking about tumblr – of course, rarely sharing their tumblog addresses, but supporting us nonetheless.
We especially would like to thank: Kath Albury, Airi-Alina Allaste, Steven Angelides, Nancy Baym, Megan Lindsay Brown, Michael Burnam-Fink, Paul Byron, Earvin Cabalquinto, Alexander Cho, Edgar Gómez Cruz, Debra Ferreday, Robbie Fordyce, Ysabel Gerrard, Ben Hanckel, Matt Hart, Larissa Hjorth, Amelia Johns, Akane Kanai, Annette Markham, Anthony McCosker, Allison McCracken, John Carter McKnight, Kristian Møller, Susanna Paasonen, Daniel Reeders, Bryce Renninger, Brady Robards, Jenny Robinson, Julian Sefton-Green, Terri Senft, Frances Shaw, Daphanie Teo, Cindy Tekobbe, Emily van der Nagel, Son Vivienne, Katie Warfield, Rosie Welch, and Andrew Whelan.
We are grateful to the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) for organizing the best conferences ever and allowing the three of us to meet, and for our talented illustrator River Juno for lending us her expert skills and sharing with us her love for tumblr too. Thank you also to Mary Savigar, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, and Stephanie Homer at Polity Press for your encouragement and patience to help us write about tumblr with a small t.
Katrin. I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked and written with Natalie and Crystal: the nuances in your ways of seeing the world, of making sense of it and of expressing yourself in writing have enriched and educated me, as a human and a scholar. I want to also thank Tallinn University, for the rector’s grant that allowed me the privilege of writing time. My undying gratitude belongs to my research participants, in particular the open, kind, interesting, funny, and sexy people for NSFW tumblr, who let me in, shared their thoughts and lives with me, and helped nourish a research project that ended up spanning eight years.
Natalie. My research was generously supported by the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre and RMIT PhD Scholarship, and grants from RMIT University and Deakin University. I am grateful for the support of a number of mental health and education organizations and services; here, they remain unnamed so as to protect the confidentiality of my research participants. I would also like to acknowledge the support of RMIT through my Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with the School of Media and Communication and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre. I am forever grateful for the nourishing writing support from Sarah Sentilles and the Right to Write community, and the tumblrs that introduced me to affect theory when I returned to studying after years away from theory. I especially thank my mother for unknowingly helping me get online in the first place, and Sam for helping me stay online through house moves, a new job, and a pandemic bedroom office, as well as Ida and Patrick for their warm welcome. Thank you, Sam, for sending me memes and bringing me dinners while I kept working late in the bedroom-office. Kat and Crystal, I still pinch myself that I was able to learn about writing and thinking for a book with both of you, during a pandemic nonetheless. Thank you both for caring, ranting, challenging, and rewriting together.
Crystal. I dedicate this book to COGY, in commemoration of our teenhood spent loitering publicly together in IRL places and gallivanting privately together on tumblr. I also write this book in memory of Carissa, who was my Super Cool Tumblr Guide. Thank you also to my precious anonymous digital penpals on tumblr, who have brought me much companionship and joy in the past decade, and to Sherman, for being in my life. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues in Internet Studies, and the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University for their cheerleading, and the ARC DECRA Fellowship that supported my research and writing time. Finally, to Kat and Nat: I still cannot believe that we completed this book in the fragile months of the blessed year 2020. Alongside feeling tired and despondent from the state of The World, I was also coping with So Many Things, and could not have made these words without your companionship, comfort, and confidence. It has been an honor and a privilege to be enveloped by the rare combination of intellect and kindness inside both of you – I am so glad we are friends IRL (and maybe someday even mutuals on tumblr).
Prologue
I found tumblr some time in 2010. I was reading a lot of fanfiction and many of the stories used images “from tumblr,” so I decided to find out what it meant. My first blog exists as twenty-five static snapshots in the Wayback Machine. Shutting down that first blog was a sudden and emotional decision and what remains of it fits. No coherent archive, rather a metaphorical stash of ticket stubs, candy wrappers, and phone numbers on stained napkins. My second blog is nine years old. My third and fourth were both set up for research. For each of these, I set up a new email address, and each is a new primary blog. This was the way of my first tumblr tribe, guided by a fervent commitment to avoiding context collapse.
–Katrin
I migrated sharing my personal “feels” and obsessions from music forums and sites like LiveJournal to posting diary-like fragments on tumblr. Those first posts are gone, manually deleted, but others endure. Each new blog marked a new project: excerpts from literature I loved, frustrated rants about the hardcore punk scene I was sort of in, screenshots of text conversations that were just too personal to go elsewhere. Like the boxes of letters, photos, and other personal archives under my bed, tumblr curates my passions and transformations. Now, my primary blog is too attached to a public early-20-something self, it is too exposing, not the tumblr self I am now. And yet this blog “follows” other blogs, this younger me, not the me in one of my active secondary blogs. I wish I could swap which blog is my primary.
–Natalie
I was introduced to tumblr when I mentored a group of teenage girls in my youth group in 2008. My main blog is the most respectable of the lot, but then one day I got bored and stopped updating it. But this “old life” still haunts me every time I open my tumblr mobile app, because my main blog is still linked to another twenty-three side blogs. Where I post depends on my mood in the moment. In one, I diary my grief from missing my sister; in another, I curate pretty pictures based on themes (fluffy birds, clouds at sunset, anime foods); still others are memory capsules, like the time I made a post every day for a month as a gift to a friend. Fingers crossed I never lose my phone and have my tumblr lives exposed.
–Crystal
Introduction: tumblr, with a small t
tumblr makes me want to have drinks with people I have never met and Facebook makes me want to throw drinks at people I already know.
(Unknown)
This is a meme that made rounds on tumblr, gathering affirmations from people across different user groups and communities. Fans, queers, “snowflakes,” sex workers, “horny people,” teenage girls with flawless aesthetics, writers, artists: they all seemed to agree, that tumblr is very different from Facebook – and much, much better. The vernacular positioning of tumblr within the social media ecology did not stop at comparisons with Facebook. Another popular meme that has circulated on tumblr at various points in time is a still from the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club, where the five main characters – described in the film as: “a brain … and an athlete … and a basket case … a princess … and a criminal” – were labeled as LinkedIn, Facebook, tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter respectively. tumblr, unsurprisingly for anyone who has ever spent time on the platform, was cast as the basket case of the group.
These comparisons were not merely vernacular. In an early interview with the New York Sun (Martin 2007), tumblr’s then 21-year-old “boy wonder,” founder David Karp, rejected the comparison between both himself and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the two social media platforms (David’s Log 2008). Karp was cited as saying that it is “lame” when your online experience ends with Facebook, which “really falls short [as a] space on the Web to identify you.” In the same breath, he also called YouTube “a miserable social experience” (Martin 2007). These little glimpses into popular and corporate imaginaries of tumblr open up our discussion of what tumblr is, how it works, and why so many people consider(ed) it special. We start with a journey through tumblr’s history and ownership.
History, ownership, and vision
tumblr was launched in February 2007. In March, the press was calling it “delightfully simple,” “blazingly fast,” and “microblogging done right” (Lowensohn 2007). By the end of the year, US$750,000 had been invested in it and trade blogs called it “the darling of the New York startup scene” (Martin 2007). In the thirteen years since, tumblr has consistently had more active users than Twitter, Snapchat, Baidu, or LinkedIn. During its first months of operation, tumblr gained 75,000 users. By 2012, this number was approximately 147 million, doubling in 2013, doubling again to 594 million in 2017, and growing to 624 million in 2018 (Roser et al. 2020). But then, this figure suddenly plummeted to just 370 million in the first months after the NSFW (Not Safe For Work) ban (see Chapter 1) that went into effect in the final weeks of 2018 (Armstrong 2019). In the global ranking of leading social media platforms (Roser et al. 2020), tumblr was usually ranked fourth to sixth from 2013 to 2018 (although different reports have different numbers and rankings, so these statistics should be taken with a grain of salt). Beyond user numbers, tumblr has always boasted impressive user engagement metrics: it had enviable retention rates – 85 percent of the blogs on the platform updated regularly (Dannen 2009) – and was consistently reported to exceed other platforms in terms of time spent on the site (Perez 2013; Ratcliff 2014).
But statistics have limited usefulness when it comes to really understanding tumblr and its significance. There is even a tumblr meme that argues this point. It started in 2013, when a tumblr user commented on a broadly circulated myth that an average person swallows eight spiders a year, saying that the factoid is based on a statistical error, because “an average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in a cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.” The post’s popularity led to the setting up of a Spiders-Georg tumblr blog (Knowyourmeme 2020a), and became memorialized as the “statistical error” meme (memedocumentation 2017). In 2015, a now-deactivated blog posted: “according to USA Today, the average tumblr user spends 2.5 hours a month on tumblr,” accompanied with a GIF of actress Mila Kunis laughing hysterically. This was reblogged with the statistical error meme, with added text that read “the average person spends 0 hours per month. We Georg, who live in caves & spend over 23 hours on tumblr each day, are outliers and should not have been counted.” To say the sentiment resonated with tumblr users would be an understatement. The post has 1,159,527 “notes” (likes and reblogs) at the time of writing.
Most social media platforms are owned by private corporations, which inevitably serve corporate and not public interests, even when governed by laws and regulations. Platform owners’ vision and governance choices often have profound, if unplanned, social, political, and cultural implications. We can recall highly publicized examples, such as Facebook and Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the results of the 2016 US general election and the UK Brexit vote (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison 2018), or the role that fake news on WhatsApp – owned by Facebook as of 2014 – played in the Brazilian 2018 elections (Pereira and Bojczuk 2018). Similarly, it matters when tumblr suddenly bans NSFW content, as it did in 2018.
By tracking changes in platform ownership, we can trace the “power relationships” and identify “how institutional structures control social enactment” (van Dijck 2013: 37–9). Directly linked to ownership is the owners’ and other stakeholders’ vision for the platform, as well as the public image it has among various constituencies – most notably, marketers, advertisers, end users, and trade presses. A platform’s vision “involves its purpose, target user base and scenarios of use,” and explicitly communicates what the platform “is supposed to do and, by extension, implies how it can be used and by whom” (Light et al. 2018: 889). In this section, we identify three phases in tumblr’s vision, guided by changes in ownership. We review tumblr when it was an independent company (2007–12), when it was owned by Yahoo! and the corporations that subsequently bought it (2013–18), and, finally, when it was most recently sold to Automattic (2019–time of writing). While there is not yet evidence that Automattic will run tumblr differently from Yahoo!, the separation is based on the cultural imaginary of Yahoo! having “ruined” tumblr. We will come back to this shortly.
A brief note. You might have noticed that we do not capitalize the word “tumblr.” We use the small “t” when we talk about tumblr as a social experience and a platform, and capitalize it when we discuss “Tumblr Inc.,” the company that developed it. The small “t” is folkloric. It reflects how people across our personal and research experiences have referred to the platform since its inception. This preference for a lower-case “t,” in turn, reflects the developers’ design choices. tumblr’s logo and app icon have both always used lowercase “t”s.
Independent tumblr
While Karp attracted investor enthusiasm and raised capital from the get-go, he was explicit about his focus being less on business and monetization and more on what he called the product. “I didn’t care how the bills got paid, or about facilities or H.R. stuff,” Karp is cited as saying in the New York Times (Walker 2012). Karp’s vision for tumblr seemed to stand on the three pillars of ease of use, design, and creativity. tumblr’s public facing texts (e.g., About page, FAQ, press clippings posted on the site) highlighted simplicity, customizability, interest-driven community, and creative self-expression. tumblr was positioned as making it easy to share “everything you find, love, hate or create” (tumblr 2007), an “effortless” way to “share” and “express yourself,” because “everything” is customizable (tumblr 2008). In 2012, corporate rhetoric shifted toward prioritizing creativity. A “what tumblr is for” segment was added to the Guidelines, stating: “Tumblr celebrates creativity. We want you to express yourself freely and use Tumblr to reflect who you are, and what you love, think, witness, and believe” (tumblr 2012). In 2015, “witness, and believe” was changed to “standing for” but other than that the mission statement has, to date, remained unchanged. The tagline, too, was updated in 2012 to “Follow the world’s creators” and has not been changed since. Karp’s interviews during the period focused on ease of use and creativity. In 2009, he is cited as saying that “the world would be a better place if more people could find, love and create things more easily” (Dannen 2009).
Karp wanted tumblr to be “a product-orientated company” (Cheshire 2012) like Google or Apple, rather than a social graph-driven one like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Those, he claimed: “are not tools built for creative expression,” adding that “nobody is proud of their identity on Facebook” (Schonfeld 2011). Trade journalists and the experts they interviewed seem largely to accept Karp’s vision of the period – tumblr was typically described by third parties as a stunningly simple, beautifully designed place for intelligent social networking and original self-expression. In terms of business, it was often called an investor darling guided by feeling. This focus on “product” paid off in terms of the site’s popularity with users. Numbers grew rapidly, reaching a point that Karp described as “we made it on the map” by 2010 (Schawbel 2013).
Yahoo! tumblr
In May 2013, Karp sold Tumblr Inc. to Yahoo! for US$1.1 billion. In terms of communicating the platform’s vision though, Karp remained true to creativity, maintaining that if they got it right with Yahoo!, tumblr would in five years “be home to the most aspiring and talented creators all over the world” (Lapowski 2013). Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo!, in turn publicly promised to “not screw it up,” while also emphasizing the potential to bring in more money by selling ads. Under Yahoo!, Karp’s comments on creativity shifted to emphasize creative expression of one’s unique self, on the one hand, but also something enacted by an empowered “creative class” who will change the world (Lapowski 2013), on the other. Increasingly, curation was mentioned as a form of creation. Karp told the BBC that “curation is a new, more accessible way to express yourself” (Mason 2012). In 2014, he said that while other social media platforms are “giant directories of profiles,” tumblr gives people a community where they can be themselves, fulfilling the promise of the internet as “a space where you could really create … an identity that you’re really, truly proud of” (Hamburger 2014). Karp argued that, unlike the “Valley,” where engineers are the shapers of the vision and the experience, tumblr is not interested in data-driven categorization of users, but, instead, instils a mindset that creators, empowered by tumblr, “are going to show us the way” (Hamburger 2014). However, tumblr’s image among trade presses and marketing professionals started to waver. While many stories continued to highlight that tumblr was aesthetically superior and loved by its users, attention was shifting to its revenue-earning potential, as per Mayer’s aim.
Although user numbers kept growing, tumblr’s revenue appeared to come to a standstill (Fell 2014); by the end of 2014, Mayer, under pressure, publicly promised that tumblr would make more than US$100 million in revenue in 2015. She merged Yahoo! and tumblr’s ad sales teams, placing both under a new executive, whose image as a “shark”1 perhaps explains the mass exodus of tumblr employees that followed. A couple of months later, Mayer reorganized Yahoo!’s leadership, placing David Karp himself under Simon Khalaf. Khalaf would later gain infamy for showing up to a tumblr staff meeting only to perplex everyone with an announcement that tumblr would “be the new PDF” (Fiegerman 2016). Retrospectively, 2015 is marked as the year when Yahoo! completely derailed tumblr. In those retrospective imaginaries, the pre-Yahoo! tumblr is described as having been “the hottest thing on the internet,” a platform that “built strong communities, launched Internet memes, led to countless book deals and helped shape the culture, online and offline,” but also a “vibrant network of powerful cultural commentary,” and one of the more beloved private tech companies in the world (Fiegerman 2016).
In June 2017, the telcom giant Verizon acquired Yahoo! – and tumblr with it. Later in the same year, it merged Yahoo! with its other acquisition, AOL, renaming the group OATH. Shortly after, tumblr’s founder and “mascot” David Karp announced that he was leaving the company, but he did not confirm whether this latest acquisition was the reason. Karp’s goodbye email further reinforced what tumblr’s vision had been under his tenure, stating that he looks back “with so much pride at a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders that have redefined our culture, and who we have helped to empower” (Menegus 2017).
Automattic tumblr
In an attempt to make tumblr more palatable for advertisers, Verizon enhanced its filtering of sexual content in 2017, and by December of the next year it announced a plan to ban all sexual content from the platform (see Chapters 1 and 6). This generated, next to public uproar, a drastic drop (estimated at 30 percent in the first three months) in user engagement and traffic (Sung 2019), and spawned a crop of tumblr clones targeted at those with interest in sexually explicit content. By May 2019, news surfaced that Verizon was looking to offload tumblr. Pornhub expressed interest, but in August, Verizon announced a sale of the platform and the company to Automattic, the owner of the blogging platform WordPress. The price tag was less than US$3 million, a phenomenal drop from the US$1.1 billion that Yahoo! had bought it for. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg echoed the popular sentiment of tumblr being something beautiful but ruined by Yahoo!, and had a hopeful vision that under Automattic the “magic” and “frisson” that tumblr once brought to blogging could be reinvigorated. “I would love for tumblr to become a social alternative,” Mullenweg said, while arguing that tumblr had always brought substance to social discourse and possessed a certain friendliness and supportiveness that other platforms lacked (Patel 2019).
Magic and frisson
But what was this “magic” and “frisson” that tumblr once brought? What are – or were – those engaged, invested users doing on tumblr? Why do or did they log on? Why are tumblr users and tumblr scholars so sure, when they say that tumblr is special and played a key role in the digital culture of the past decade? A strong pattern emerges from qualitative, immersive research. Conversations around fandom (Bourlai 2018; Burton 2019; Hillman et al. 2014), feminism (Connelly 2015; Keller 2019), LGBTQIA+2 experiences (Byron 2019; Cho 2015a; Feraday 2016; Fink and Miller 2014; Haimson et al. 2019; Oakley 2016), and NSFW topics (Mondin 2017; Tiidenberg 2014a, 2020; Tiidenberg and van der Nagel 2020) are all highly visible on tumblr. So are the users’ commitments to social justice (Burton 2019; Wargo 2017a) and mental health (Cavazos-Rehg et al. 2017; Hendry 2020a; Seko and Lewis 2018) while having those conversations. Further, across these interests and commitments, users have told researchers that their tumblr experiences are communal, consciousness-raising, therapeutic, and educational (Chew 2018; Hendry 2020b; McCracken 2017; Tiidenberg 2014b, 2017). People often feel that on tumblr they can truly be themselves (Renninger 2014; Tiidenberg 2013). tumblr users seem to be quite self-aware about the platform’s role in their lives. Posts listing “things tumblr has taught me” are so common they can be considered a platform-specific meme (Figure i.1; see Chapter 5 for a discussion on tumblr pedagogies, and Chapters 6 and 7 on learning in specific groups and communities). Some of these lists are serious, others are funny, yet others deeply sincere. Many are everything at once.
Figure i.1: Artist’s impression of a now-deactivated blog post from 2015 listing “Things tumblr has taught me,” with approximately 30,000 notes. Art provided by River Juno.
Most statistics show that tumblr’s user base has always been predominantly composed of young people or millennials (variously recognized as born between the early 1980s to the late 1990s; Petrov 2020), with some growing up on the platform through their teen years into their twenties and thirties. In part, the youthful nature of the platform explains why it was a place for learning and for people to “find themselves” (see Chapters 2 and 5). This narrative of tumblr having had a profound transformative and educational impact on (young) people is reproduced by journalists. tumblr is credited with having “taught social justice to a generation of teenagers” (Sarappo 2018), “taught the world how to speak Australian” (Nye 2017), taught writers to write (Manley 2013), taught youth about nonbinary gender identities (Arscott 2018), and offered them “a means of survival” (Morris 2019). However, many of these narratives are veiled in nostalgia, deeming circa 2012–14 as tumblr’s heyday and presuming that it no longer offers these things (Jennings 2020; Morris 2019). As tumblr researchers and authors of this book, we grappled with the same sentiment (we will return to the notion of “lost” tumblr and tumblr’s demise in the Conclusion). Yet, the “#what tumblr has taught me” hashtag keeps returning results every time we conduct a search. A brief walkthrough (Figure i.2) shows that in 2020, tumblr users are still learning and still crediting tumblr with it.
Of course, tumblr is not a utopia. There are conflicts, arguments, toxic dog piling, and trolling between users (see Chapter 5 for a discussion on call-out cultures). The general consensus, however, seems to be that compared to most alternatives, tumblr has offered an inhabitable space for people and communities, especially those with minoritarian experiences, identifications, lifestyles, and values. As noted in the roundtable interview published in The Ringer, tumblr “felt friendlier than other famously weird internet zones like Reddit or 4chan. I still felt like I was on a cool detour, but I wasn’t in the Wild West, you know?” (Bereznak et al. 2017).
Figure i.2: Artist’s impression of a collage of some posts under “#what tumblr has taught me.” Art provided by River Juno.
Overall then, tumblr has been formative of the worldviews and identities of many (mostly young) people; has played a significant part in elevating conversations on gender, sexual identities, intersectionality, and cultural representations thereof; and has launched, or at least played an instrumental role in, various social movements, such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter (Baptiste 2017; Safronova 2014; Sutter 2011; see also chapters in McCracken et al. 2020). Some think that tumblr’s 2010 meme war with 4chan served as a direct precursor to the polarization that characterizes our current (online) opinion space (Rosenberg 2020).3 Despite all of this, tumblr remained an obscure, cult-like subculture to nonusers, a space difficult to “crack” for marketers, and a platform to which little or no attention was paid by academics outside research on fandom or queer youth. Why?
tumblr is a silosocial platform
Social media are diverse, but public imaginaries of their functions and implications are dominated by Facebook. Scholarship too, is heavily skewed toward Facebook (given its popularity worldwide), and also Twitter (given its high accessibility for researchers to extract data via the API). Generalist discussions and critiques of social media therefore often presume that social media sociality4 is profile-based and built on what is called the social graph and the ego network.5 In the case of Facebook, egos in the graph are represented by profiles – descriptions of the account owner’s social characteristics, often in the form of answers to questions, sometimes via predetermined options. This version of social media sociality is linked to individual connections and has been multiply critiqued in the past decade: as networked individualism (Wellman 2002), as people converging around someone’s profile or interacting in dyads instead of converging around interests (Baym 2010), as leading to context collapse resulting from the inability to modulate one’s self presentations to different audiences (Marwick and boyd 2011), as fostering a culture of connectivity instead one of connection (van Dijck 2013), or even as antisocial, because it discourages deliberation (Vaidhyanathan 2018).
The following are generalizations, of course, but they reflect dominant trends on platforms and, more importantly, dominant imaginaries about the platforms, which together converge into an increasingly popular narrative of a broken internet (Berners-Lee 2019; Phillips 2020). Facebook started out as a social ego network intended for interpersonal interaction, but has, according to American media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan (2018), devolved into a network of amplified prejudices and predilections. Twitter, according to media and communication scholars Jean Burgess and Nancy Baym (2020: 13), remains unsure whether it should be a social network or an information network, and which of the two is a more valuable form of human communication, even if the founders themselves have framed the platform’s transformation “from a me-centered, personal, and intimate Twitter, to a world-centered, public, and newsy one” as progress. Instagram, as argued by internet researchers Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield, and Crystal Abidin (2020), increasingly functions as a communication and commerce network, where sociality is template-based and communication rarely leads to collective experiences (Leaver and Highfield 2018). In contrast, tumblr’s features, functions, governance, and user cultures – as we will go on to show – differ significantly from these popular platforms. tumblr is a social network, but not profile-based or legal name-linked, and welcomes multifaceted self-presentation; it is informative, but through educational rather than newsy ways; attention flows and converges on it but is linked differently to commerce than elsewhere.
As a result, a very particular, idiosyncratic form of sociality has emerged on tumblr. We call it “silosociality,” because it is experienced through silos – experiential tumblrs imagined and enacted by users as somewhat apart from each other. Silos emerge out of and are defined by people’s shared interests, but sustained through shared practices, vernacular, and sensibility. We conceptualize this in detail in Chapters 1 and 2. Silosociality is thus the cultural and experiential dynamic that relies on tumblr’s features and governance (Chapter 1) but is (re)produced by how people imagine and do things on tumblr (Chapter 2). We argue that silosociality explains tumblr’s pivotal role in shaping digital culture, but also fills a conceptual gap in existing social media analyses (see Chapter 2) and helps illuminate possible trajectories for the future.
What is in this book
While the book offers most when read in its entirety, we have taken care to include cross-references and to construct the chapters so that they can be read separately. The early chapters describe and explain the structure and broad logics of tumblr. Chapter 1 analyzes tumblr as a built, corporately owned space with particular features and functions, governed in particular ways. We highlight the features and functions used when setting up a blog, posting, reblogging, tagging, and interacting on the platform as well as the rules for acceptable behavior and intended use(r)s. Chapter 2 focuses on tumblr as a social space that has unique affordances, which lead to an emergence of a shared vernacular based on curatorial and multimodal expression, personal testimonials, and affinity-based participation, and a shared sensibility that is committed to social justice and safe spaces. We demonstrate how these three elements – affordances, vernacular, and sensibility – along with tumblr’s features and rules, contribute to creating tumblr’s silosociality. In Chapter 3, we look at attention flows on tumblr, analyzing the business model, the forms of commerce, and the discursive strategies of attention hacking used on the platform by Tumblr Inc., brands, celebrities, influencers, and everyday users.
Chapters 4–7 explore what we want to elevate as the key silos on tumblr. We discuss the fandom silo in Chapter 4, outlining how tumblr has always afforded fan cultures and describing fannish uses of the tumblr vernacular and sensibility in two less-researched fan communities – K-pop and the tumblr meta-fandom. In Chapter 5, we discuss the nuances of social media practices and sensibilities through the example of the queer silo. Here, we talk about social justice warriors, call-out cultures, tumblr pedagogies, and queer tumblr in terms of both a utopian bubble and an overwhelming vortex. The NSFW (sexually explicit) silo is discussed in Chapter 6. We open up with how safe spaces were built within this silo, and explore how these allowed people to experiment, accept themselves, diversify their standards, expand their tolerance, and find a socially just voice. In Chapter 7, we examine the mental health silo. While mental health professionals tend to position tumblr as problematic, even harmful, arguing that depression, self-harm, anxiety, and disordered eating are exacerbated on the platform, our participants’ lived experiences paint a much more nuanced, ambiguous picture of freedom, validation, modulated visibility, and laughing about their own pain.
While these four silos emerge out of our own fieldwork and have consistently been named as having key importance by our tumblr-researching colleagues, we are mindful to avoid totalizing claims. The tumblr signposted by these silos is one – relevant, perhaps even dominant – version. But there are other culturally and geographically specific imaginaries of tumblr (e.g., in Japan, tumblr is commonly perceived as simply a site to host a creative’s visual portfolios). In the Conclusion, we discuss whether tumblr is “dying,” as some critics have been arguing after the NSFW ban, or simply mutating into something new. We discuss tumblr silosociality as offering education and escape, and finish with imagining silosocial futures for social media as such.
Our research methods
We have been researching tumblr since 2011. To understand tumblr practices, cultures, vernacular, and sensibilities, we have – between the three of us – conducted a decade’s worth of multifaceted ethnographic fieldwork, comprising:
observations across different tumblr silos and in various tumblr communities (network of eating disorder blogs, NSFW selfie community, East Asian NSFW tumblr communities, various K-pop fandoms,
Supernatural
and
Teen Wolf
fandoms and meta-tumblr fandoms, mental health blogs including Borderline Personality Disorder communities and art blogs related to mental health, queer tumblr);
approximately one hundred individual interviews, approximately ten group interviews, focus groups, and creative workshops, and twelve image elicitation conversations with tumblr users;
analyses of an uncountable number of tumblr posts, tumblr blogs, and hashtag conversations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, using content-, thematic-, discourse-, and narrative-analysis;
hashtag and keyword mapping exercises; and
participant observation in school and hospital settings.
To contextualize what is happening on the platform and how tumblr users make sense of it, we have studied tumblr as a corporately owned technical structure. For this, we have analyzed:
hundreds of trade press and news articles, interviews with key tumblr employees, and marketing, pop culture, and technology blogs (e.g., Adweek,
The Atlantic
, Bustle, CNET, Fast Company, Forbes, Gawker, the
Guardian
, i-D, Mashable,
The New York Times
, Popsugar,
The Ringer
, TechCrunch, The Verge, Vice,
Wall Street Journal
, Wired);
fourteen years’ worth of tumblr’s marketing (press releases, tag lines, app store descriptions) and governance (Terms of Service Agreements, Community Guidelines, Privacy Policy, About page, Help page, Staff Blog posts), texts procured using Google search, the Wayback Machine, and updates logged on Github.
At moments of heightened attention to tumblr (e.g., the 2012 content moderation change, the 2018 NSFW ban, various changes of ownership), we have gathered – both manually and using automated scraping tools – content regarding tumblr that was sourced either from tumblr itself or via other social media sites (e.g., Buzzfeed, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube).
Finally, we analyzed tumblr features, functionalities, and interfaces across the years drawing from our personal research archives of fieldnotes and screenshots, the Wayback Machine, and conducted a systematic walkthrough of the platform and its app in 2020.
Our arguments rely on our extensive empirical work, but also dialogue with the research conducted by our colleagues. Wherever possible, we allow our research participants to speak for themselves, quoting interview snippets or reproducing sections of blog posts. Whenever we quote people we interviewed, we refer to them by research pseudonyms, as agreed in our informed consent negotiations. Where we reproduce images or posts, we follow three strategies. Publicly accessible, noncontroversial, widely shared content is reproduced as is, or anonymized. Where we have needed to depict a practice (e.g., the massive nested system of reblogs converging in a single post), illustrate the interface (e.g., notes showing all the likes and reblogs and comments), or reproduce contentious material (e.g., thinspo, NSFW content), we err on the side of caution and care – we use artist impressions to convey these visual practices or publish blog outtakes without linking them either to a tumblr username or to the research-based pseudonym linked to interview quotes. Where content is not contentious, but we have been uncertain about whether users would like their usernames reproduced, we have modified screenshots or commissioned artist impressions to preserve user or content confidentiality; however, where we have felt it important for the user to be acknowledged and credited for their creative contributions, we name them briefly.
Writing this book has been a labor of love and we are happy and grateful that you have chosen to come on this journey with us. Thank you.
Notes
1
Calling someone a “shark,” is usually intended to highlight that they do not shy away from taking advantage of other people to reach their goals.
2
LGBTQIA+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual, plus other sexual and gender identifications. The most common acronym continues to be LGBT. From here on in this book, we will refer to the acronym that is used by our participants or by the researchers we cite; otherwise we will use LGBTQIA+ and, when talking about the silo that brings together people with these interests, we will also use the folkloric “queer.”
3
There were two “wars” between 4chan and tumblr: one in 2010 that involved mutual spamming (first of shock images by 4chan users to tumblr then of kitten images by tumblr users to 4chan) and another in 2014 where a tumblr blog posted a plan to shut down 4chan (some think this was created by 4chan users as a ruse), to which 4chan users responded by hijacking social justice tags on tumblr with gore content, which tumblr users responded to by burying the content into an avalanche of cute things (Knowyourmeme 2020b).
4
Sociality is a term used to describe how people are social in the world and how they experience being in collectives.
5
A social graph is the visualized network of interconnections of relationships, basically a representation of how users are connected to each other, their product pages and interests. An ego network is a slightly different perspective on the same thing – it focuses on individuals (egos) and their ties with other individuals.
1tumblr structure
The way tumblr is set up – the likes and reblogs – provides the framework for constant feedback and support. It’s easy to feel like I’ve been heard, appreciated, understood. We are connected with very intimate parts of ourselves and it makes it easier to see people’s humanity and to be compassionate toward them. I know how hard it is to be so open and I appreciate that others do the same. I find myself responding in ways through tumblr that just wouldn’t be socially acceptable in real life, and others do the same
(Katie: personal interview by authors, 2012)
The way tumblr is set up feels to me like it replicates a couple of significant modes of offline affiliation – the ability to “like” and “reblog” as well as comment feel to me like an analogue of some of the mirroring that happens between people who are working at attuning with one another in person. So, I would say it’s just been a matter of feeling out shared likes and dislikes, and developing a sense that we share enough to have that kind of identification with one another. Or shared community identity, at any rate.
(Olly: personal interview by authors, 2012)
This chapter is about tumblr as a built space. We explore it as a platform that is wrought from computer code and design choices, owned and managed by corporate entities that have particular goals and sets specific rules for users. To do this, we analyze tumblr’s features and functions first, and then discuss tumblr’s platform governance by describing its most pertinent rules and how they are enforced. This chapter is written to be read alongside Chapter 2, where we continue to analyze how people imagine what they can do on tumblr and how they actually use it.
Features and functions
Features and functions of social media platforms can be thought of as “arrangements that mandate or enable an activity,” (Light et al. 2018: 891). Broadly, both features and functions have been defined as indications of what people can do with a thing. A feature is literally “what users can do with a technology” (Markus and Silver 2008: 612), while what an artifact is for – and it is arguably always for something – is the artifact’s function (Franssen et al. 2018). Social media platforms’ features (e.g., a “heart” button) communicate and suggest actions (e.g., clicking it) as well as an assortment of possible meanings of those actions (e.g., “if I click it, I like it” – see Bucher and Helmond 2017).
While there are many features and functions on tumblr that are similar to those on other social media platforms, there are also those that are unique to tumblr, and still others that were pioneered on tumblr before becoming pervasive across the social media ecosystem. We start with a discussion of what setting up and posting on tumblr is like. This takes us through a brief description and history of the features and functions that deprioritize the social graph and invite multimodality and personalization. We then discuss, in more detail, three clusters of features and functions that make tumblr stand out: (1) tumblr’s signature reblog, (2) the tumblr-unique format for hashtags, and (3) the unconventional features and functions for on-platform interaction.
Setting up and posting
Setting up a tumblr account is easy: users only need to provide a functioning email address and state their age and, voilà, they have a blog. Tumblr Inc.’s designers and engineers try to help new users find “what’re you into” (see Chapter 2
