and multimodal expression, personal testimonials, and affinity-based participation, and a shared sensibility that is committed to social justice and safe spaces. We demonstrate how these three elements – affordances, vernacular, and sensibility – along with tumblr’s features and rules, contribute to creating tumblr’s silosociality. In Chapter 3, we look at attention flows on tumblr, analyzing the business model, the forms of commerce, and the discursive strategies of attention hacking used on the platform by Tumblr Inc., brands, celebrities, influencers, and everyday users.
Chapters 4–7 explore what we want to elevate as the key silos on tumblr. We discuss the fandom silo in Chapter 4, outlining how tumblr has always afforded fan cultures and describing fannish uses of the tumblr vernacular and sensibility in two less-researched fan communities – K-pop and the tumblr meta-fandom. In Chapter 5, we discuss the nuances of social media practices and sensibilities through the example of the queer silo. Here, we talk about social justice warriors, call-out cultures, tumblr pedagogies, and queer tumblr in terms of both a utopian bubble and an overwhelming vortex. The NSFW (sexually explicit) silo is discussed in Chapter 6. We open up with how safe spaces were built within this silo, and explore how these allowed people to experiment, accept themselves, diversify their standards, expand their tolerance, and find a socially just voice. In Chapter 7, we examine the mental health silo. While mental health professionals tend to position tumblr as problematic, even harmful, arguing that depression, self-harm, anxiety, and disordered eating are exacerbated on the platform, our participants’ lived experiences paint a much more nuanced, ambiguous picture of freedom, validation, modulated visibility, and laughing about their own pain.
While these four silos emerge out of our own fieldwork and have consistently been named as having key importance by our tumblr-researching colleagues, we are mindful to avoid totalizing claims. The tumblr signposted by these silos is one – relevant, perhaps even dominant – version. But there are other culturally and geographically specific imaginaries of tumblr (e.g., in Japan, tumblr is commonly perceived as simply a site to host a creative’s visual portfolios). In the Conclusion, we discuss whether tumblr is “dying,” as some critics have been arguing after the NSFW ban, or simply mutating into something new. We discuss tumblr silosociality as offering education and escape, and finish with imagining silosocial futures for social media as such.
Our research methods
We have been researching tumblr since 2011. To understand tumblr practices, cultures, vernacular, and sensibilities, we have – between the three of us – conducted a decade’s worth of multifaceted ethnographic fieldwork, comprising:
observations across different tumblr silos and in various tumblr communities (network of eating disorder blogs, NSFW selfie community, East Asian NSFW tumblr communities, various K-pop fandoms, Supernatural and Teen Wolf fandoms and meta-tumblr fandoms, mental health blogs including Borderline Personality Disorder communities and art blogs related to mental health, queer tumblr);
approximately one hundred individual interviews, approximately ten group interviews, focus groups, and creative workshops, and twelve image elicitation conversations with tumblr users;
analyses of an uncountable number of tumblr posts, tumblr blogs, and hashtag conversations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, using content-, thematic-, discourse-, and narrative-analysis;
hashtag and keyword mapping exercises; and
participant observation in school and hospital settings.
To contextualize what is happening on the platform and how tumblr users make sense of it, we have studied tumblr as a corporately owned technical structure. For this, we have analyzed:
hundreds of trade press and news articles, interviews with key tumblr employees, and marketing, pop culture, and technology blogs (e.g., Adweek, The Atlantic, Bustle, CNET, Fast Company, Forbes, Gawker, the Guardian, i-D, Mashable, The New York Times, Popsugar, The Ringer, TechCrunch, The Verge, Vice, Wall Street Journal, Wired);
fourteen years’ worth of tumblr’s marketing (press releases, tag lines, app store descriptions) and governance (Terms of Service Agreements, Community Guidelines, Privacy Policy, About page, Help page, Staff Blog posts), texts procured using Google search, the Wayback Machine, and updates logged on Github.
At moments of heightened attention to tumblr (e.g., the 2012 content moderation change, the 2018 NSFW ban, various changes of ownership), we have gathered – both manually and using automated scraping tools – content regarding tumblr that was sourced either from tumblr itself or via other social media sites (e.g., Buzzfeed, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube).
Finally, we analyzed tumblr features, functionalities, and interfaces across the years drawing from our personal research archives of fieldnotes and screenshots, the Wayback Machine, and conducted a systematic walkthrough of the platform and its app in 2020.
Our arguments rely on our extensive empirical work, but also dialogue with the research conducted by our colleagues. Wherever possible, we allow our research participants to speak for themselves, quoting interview snippets or reproducing sections of blog posts. Whenever we quote people we interviewed, we refer to them by research pseudonyms, as agreed in our informed consent negotiations. Where we reproduce images or posts, we follow three strategies. Publicly accessible, noncontroversial, widely shared content is reproduced as is, or anonymized. Where we have needed to depict a practice (e.g., the massive nested system of reblogs converging in a single post), illustrate the interface (e.g., notes showing all the likes and reblogs and comments), or reproduce contentious material (e.g., thinspo, NSFW content), we err on the side of caution and care – we use artist impressions to convey these visual practices or publish blog outtakes without linking them either to a tumblr username or to the research-based pseudonym linked to interview quotes. Where content is not contentious, but we have been uncertain about whether users would like their usernames reproduced, we have modified screenshots or commissioned artist impressions to preserve user or content confidentiality; however, where we have felt it important for the user to be acknowledged and credited for their creative contributions, we name them briefly.
Writing this book has been a labor of love and we are happy and grateful that you have chosen to come on this journey with us. Thank you.
Notes
1 Calling someone a “shark,” is usually intended to highlight that they do not shy away from taking advantage of other people to reach their goals. 2 LGBTQIA+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual, plus other sexual and gender identifications. The most common acronym continues to be LGBT. From here on in this book, we will refer to the acronym that is used by our participants or by the researchers we cite; otherwise we will use LGBTQIA+ and, when talking about the silo that brings together people with these interests, we will also use the folkloric “queer.” 3 There were two “wars” between 4chan and tumblr: one in 2010 that involved mutual spamming (first of shock images by 4chan users to tumblr then of kitten images by tumblr users to 4chan) and another in 2014 where a tumblr blog posted a plan to shut down 4chan (some think this was created by 4chan users as a ruse), to which 4chan users responded by hijacking social justice tags on tumblr with gore content, which tumblr users responded to by burying the content into an avalanche of cute things (Knowyourmeme 2020b). 4 Sociality is a term used to describe how people are social in the world and how they experience being in collectives.
