tumblr

Prologue

“For each of these, I set up a new email address, and each is a new primary blog. This is the way of my first tumblr tribe, guided by a fervent commitment to avoiding context collapse” (pp. ix)
“sharing my personal ‘feels’ and obsessions” (pp. ix)
“Each new blog marked a new project: excerpts from literature I loved, frustrated rants about the hardcore punk scene I was sort of in, screen-shots of text conversations that were just too personal to go elsewhere.” (pp. ix)
“Like the boxes of letters, photos and other personal archives under my bed, tumblr curates my passions and transformations.” (pp. ix)
“too exposing” - “I wish I could swap which blog is primary” (pp. ix-x)
“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” (pp. x)

Introduction: tumblr, with a small t

“they all seemed to agree, that tumblr is very different m Facebook - and much, much better” (pp. 1)
“microblogging done right” - press description, from Lowensohn (2007) (pp. 2 here)
i think how people originally ended up there was the legacy of web1.0 in increasing encroachment of web2.0
“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 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)” (pp. 2)
“By tracking changes in platform ownership, we can trace the “power relationships” and identify “how institutional structures control social reenactment” (van Dijck 2013: 37-9) ” (pp. 3)
“We use the small “t” when we talk about tumblr as a social experience and a platform, and capitalise it when we discuss “Tumblr Inc.,” the company that developed it. The small “t” is folkloric.” (pp. 4)
“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)” (pp. 4)
“tumblr was positioned as making it easy to share “everything you find, love, hate or create” (tumblr 2007)” (pp. 5)
“something enacted by an empowered “creative class” who will change the world (Lapowski 2013)” (pp. 6)
“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)” (pp. 6)
“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)” (pp. 6)
“attention was shifting to its revenue-earning potential, as per Mayer’s aim. Although user numbers kept growing, [T]umblr’s revenue appeared to come to a standstill (Fell 2014)” (pp. 6)
swathes of immersive qualitative research show pervasive focus on fandom, feminism, queer experience, NSFW topics, social justice, mental health (pp. 9)
users had described it as “communal, consciousness-raising, therapeutic and educational” (pp. 9)
“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.” (pp. 10)
“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)” (here pp. 10)
“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)” (pp. 11)
“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 (Rosenburg 2020).”
“Social media are diverse, but public imaginaries of their functions and implications are dominated by Facebook” (pp. 12)
“This version of social media sociality is linked to individual connections and has been multiply critiqued in the past decade: as networked individualism [and] as leading to context collapse resulting from the inability to modulate one’s self presentations to different audiences (Marwick and boyd 2011)” (pp. 12)
“culture of connectivity instead of connection” (pp. 12)
Instagram as “a communications and commerce network where sociality is template-based and communication rarely leads to collective experiences (Leaver and Highfield, 2018)”
TBC

“Perception of such deletion vary across users. For some it is an affront, while for others it is a perfectly natural aspect of curation.”
‘hashtags also have metacommunicative (Zappavigna 2018) and social functions, which allow people to gather around issues or affect (Papacharissi 2015; Rambukkana 2015)
“Pedagogy for social change’ pp.135
“I miss a space where I could explore and construct a juxtapositional, incoherent, multifaceted version of myself…a particular engaged, kind audience…a space where I contained multitudes”