rel="nofollow" href="#u88c4dd97-1d62-53e8-b3db-e676f98d1cfc">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
