Tumblr's use of tags

  1. as in general social media use, loosely in a semi-public, emergent or peer-induced manner, for wider reach or some vague sense of organisation
  2. for very specific and personal indexing methods (personomies)
  3. for commentary (tags as content)

for more discussion on nuances in general usage see ‘altruistic’ vs ‘selfish’ tagging aims

the second usage is uncommon on social media generally but more common to Web 1.0, social bookmarking, earlier file-sharing, personal custom setups, and is of interest to library/archival studies

the third usage is very uncommon, if not largely unique to Tumblr

Resources

Section titled “Resources”
  • Tiidenberg, K., Hendry, N.A. and Abidin, C. (2021) Tumblr. Polity Press (Digital Media and Society).
  • Bourlai, E.E. (2018) ‘“Comments in Tags, Please!”: Tagging practices on Tumblr’, Discourse, Context & Media, 22, pp. 46–56. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.08.003.
  • Dame, A. (2016) ‘Making a name for yourself: tagging as transgender ontological practice on Tumblr’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33(1), pp. 23–37. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2015.1130846.