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Fall 2021 Panel:
Hosted by the Social Media Narratives Class
More info:
https://katrin-tiidenberg.com/ Tumblr We (Natalie Hendry, Crystal Abidin and I) wrote the book Tumblr (Polity Press, 2021) primarily because we felt there was a need for a systematic analysis of a platform that has played such an important part in the (digital) cultures of the 21st century, and because we hoped that undertaking said systematic analysis might help us understand some things about social media and where it is headed. I hope we've succeeded in this, but that is, ultimately, for readers to decide. Why do tumblr users and scholars keep saying that tumblr is special and culturally impactful? For one, it has been a platform that profoundly shaped how people experienced, enacted and talked about fandom, feminism, queerness, sex, social justice, mental health, etc. It has been formative of the worldviews and identities of many (mostly young) people, played a significant part in elevating conversations on gender, sexual identities, intersectionality and cultural representations thereof, functioned as a well of bottom-up creativity from which social media trends, aesthetics and memetic activity bubbled up, and launched or at least played an instrumental role in various social movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Tumblr users – whatever their interests that brough them to and kept them on the platform - have consistently told researchers that their tumblr experiences differed quite a lot from their other social media experiences. Being on tumblr is often described as communal, consciousness raising, therapeutic, and educational. Posts listing "things tumblr has taught me" are so common they can be considered a platform specific meme (see image from book). Of course, tumblr isn't a utopia, many of its affordances and traits as a social space have a darker flipside – in the book we discuss things like dogpiling, toxic positivity and overly intense and vortex-like experiences.
Despite its personally formative and culturally constitutive role, tumblr remained an obscure, cult-like subculture to non-users, a space difficult to ‘crack’ for marketers, and a platform rarely paid attention to by academics outside of research on fandom or queer youth. Why? Unlike many other popular social media platforms, it is not profile-based nor legal name-linked, it welcomes multifaceted self-presentation; 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 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. For us, silosociality explains tumblr’s pivotal cultural role, but also fills a conceptual gap in existing ways of making sense of social media and helps illuminate possible trajectories for the future. Finally, of course, it has to be noted that many of these narratives are veiled in nostalgia. 2012–2014 is broadly framed as tumblr’s heyday and many presume tumblr to be ‘over,’ especially after the NSFW ban debacle in late 2018. We talk about this too, about escapism, nostalgia, irrelevance and possible future scenarios.
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Panelists
Meredith D. Clark
Shaohua Guo
Mark Marino
Jeff Nunokawa
Élika Ortega
Abraham Richie
Katrin Tiidenberg
SAIC ATS Class in Social Media Narrative Host: SAIC ATS Part-time Faculty: Judy Malloy |
Katrin Tiidenberg is a social media researcher and Professor of Participatory Culture at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts Institute in Tallinn University. She has authored four books on social media platforms, cultures and practices, most recently (2021) Tumblr ( co-authored with Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin; and edited three collections on methods and conceptual frameworks for making sense of the internet, digital culture and social media, including Metaphors of Internet, Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity with Annette N Markham.
