Tumblr

Katrin Tiidenberg,Natalie Ann Hendry,Crystal Abidin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509541102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1
tumblr 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) during the onboarding process. This directs users to curate their own blogs as interest-based spaces too. The blogs are not profiles, and whether any particular blog has a description at all depends on the chosen blog “theme”; these are available for free and for purchase in the tumblr “themes” catalogue. Further, those descriptions are completely open, filled out with any information that users deem relevant (see Oakely 2016 on self-labeling in About sections). After setting up one blog, users can set up as many “secondary” or “side” blogs as they want and toggle between their blogs from the same user interface. While only “primary” or “main” blogs (created upon account sign-up) have social features that allow following others, liking, and replying to posts, secondary blogs can be set to be private- and password-protected. A user cannot change a previously primary blog to private, or a previously secondary blog to primary (something often highlighted as a fault by users), so it is quite common for users to set up more than one primary account. Users with multiple (primary or secondary) blogs generally argue that this allows for multifaceted self-presentation, audience segregation, and identity curation.

Types of blog posts invited via specific buttons are text posts, photo posts, quote posts, link posts, chat posts, and audio or video posts (see Figure 1.1 for tumblr’s dashboard on a desktop). Visual content, in particular photos, is very popular (78.11 percent of posts in Chang et al. 2014). While most social media platforms allow sharing texts, links, and visual content, the tumblr “chat” post format is less common. Linguists Camilla Vásquez and Samantha Creel (2017) link the popularization of chat memes, especially the me-chat meme, across social media directly to this tumblr feature. Me-chat memes usually feature a pretend conversation between various facets of one’s identity, like “past me” and “present me,” or just two “me”s with incompatible goals and desires, usually to a humorous or relatable effect (see Chapter 7).

Figure 1.1: Artist’s impression of the changing interface design of tumblr’s dashboard. left: 2007; right: current browser dashboard at the time of writing in 2020. Art provided by River Juno.

While different types of posts continue to be differentiated and the “chat” post was still available via the browser-based Dashboard in 2020, the mobile interface has recently been updated to significantly alter the posting experience (Figure 1.2). The post icon looks like a pen, which feels less multimodal and more writing-centric and “bloglike.” This possibly follows Automattic’s acquisition, as the company is best known for the legendary blogging platform WordPress. Clicking on the pen icon gives further options of taking an image, uploading image or video from the camera roll, adding a link, making or choosing a GIF, choosing an audio file from Spotify or Soundcloud, and adding hashtags. However, the experience of tumblr is not just about posting but, more importantly, about consuming what other people have posted.

Figure 1.2: Artist’s impression of the tumblr interface via the app on a mobile phone. Art provided by River Juno.

Reblogs

Users who set up an account can “follow” other blogs, upon which the content posted to those blogs converges into their “dashboard” feed. Following is not necessarily reciprocal, although bloggers within specific communities do follow each other and refer to each other as “mutuals” (see Chapter 3). Further, “lists” of whom one follows are not automatically visible to others, but rather, one has to select a blog theme that allows for it and choose to publish the list. Posts seen on one’s dashboard can be “liked” by clicking the heart button (introduced in 2008), replied to by clicking the “reply” button (introduced in 2010), or reblogged by clicking the “reblog” button. Each user sees what they themselves have liked in the “likes” list, which is, again, hidden from others. All of the likes, replies, and reblogs of a particular post are summarily calculated as “notes,” which is the primary metric of how much attention a post has generated on the platform.

To reblog is to repost someone else’s post to your own blog, whether partially or entirely. Reblogging (and “following”) were tumblr’s original features from its launch in March 2007, preceding retweeting on Twitter¹ and sharing on Facebook. Reblogging has always been a central practice on tumblr, with less than 10 percent of content qualifying as original (Xu et al. 2014). Clicking on the reblog button opens someone else’s post in a new window allowing the reposter to add to it or reblog it as is. All post types are rebloggable, so one might reblog an image with a caption, a text post, a GIF set with comments, or a set of nested, cascading threads of previous reblogs, wherein every next reblogger has added a comment or a sentiment (see Figure 1.3).²

Initially, only text could be added to reblogs, but a 2017 update made adding images possible, which led to long intertextual image threads. Authorship of the original post as well as the content added in previous reblogs can be deleted from the body of the post. Perceptions of such deletion vary across users. For some it is an affront, while for others it is a perfectly natural aspect of curation. The source of the original post, as well the blog from which it was most recently reblogged, remains embedded in the code and visible at the top of the post even when the information is deleted from the body of the post.

Figure 1.3: Artist’s impression of an example of a cascading multi-reblog post on tumblr. Art provided by River Juno.

These features make authorship and curatorship visible, which has further social implications. Interacting with other people’s content via reblogging deincentivizes trolling and increases accountability for one’s words (Renninger 2014). Fieldwork across different user groups has shown that people tend to reblog content they agree with or appreciate, because reblogging out of hate publishes the disliked content on one’s own blog (Kanai 2015; Shorey 2015). Reblogging has taken on myriad additional meanings on tumblr. It fosters dialogue, consciousness-raising, and community creation (Connelly 2015; Marquart 2010), and allows the shy to express themselves (Salmon 2012). But it is also used to curate, reappropriate, frame, and remix – as one of media scholar Alessandra Mondin’s (2017) research participants said, “the way a lot of tumblr bloggers reblog things makes them feminist and/or queer” (see Chapters 5 and 6). Further, media scholar Akane Kanai (2019) has argued that reblogging is a form of phatic communication that articulates a sense of connection and retains sociability instead of, or in addition to, directly exchanging information. It is common for tumblr users to start a relationship by reblogging each other’s content with thoughtful commentary or funny compliments.

Reblogging is also an affective practice. Digital media anthropologist Alexander Cho (2015a) describes reblogging through Paasonen’s (2011) notion of “resonance” and his own notion of “reverb,” both of which highlight the sensation of intensity and affect involved in noticing and choosing to reblog posts, but also in demarcating the quality that makes some posts so rebloggable. Kanai (2017) adds “relatability” to the types of affect that drive reblogging. Relatability builds publics of like-minded users, who relate to each other’s daily experiences. All three – resonance, reverberation, and relatability – are experienced based on one’s life circumstance, thus bringing together people with similar experiences of, among other things, marginalization or discrimination, contributing to emerge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: tumblr, with a small t
• 1 tumblr structure
• 2 tumblr sociality
• 3 fame
• 4 fandom
• 5 social justice
• 6 NSFW
• 7 mental health
• Conclusion: “beautiful hellsite”
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement