The first rule of Tumblr is you don’t talk about Tumblr. The second rule is that you definitely don’t talk about it to your mainstream friends (if you even have any), because their presence on the site would ruin the point. These were the guidelines for a few thousand hipsters circa 2007, who closely guarded the coolness of a website that would eventually skyrocket in popularity.
Today Tumblr- equal parts Twitter, Facebok, Last.FM, and Blogspot - is another of the internet’s great beasts of burden, hosting over 34 million blogs and millions of users. But what does Tumblr (pronounced tumbler) actually do, other than exclude certain vowels from its domain name to seem cool? The easy answer is that it is a blogging platform that allows users to interact by “following” each other. They can post pictures, text, videos, music, links, chats, and GIFs, which are moving pictures akin to those in The Daily Prophet. Because of what junior Emily Molnar credits as
“the incredible diversity of blogs”, users can tailor what they see when they log onto the site.“
The definitive Tumblr feature, though, isn’t its following system (we all know you got that one from Twitter, guys) but something called re-blogging. Re-blogging, which is the very core of the Tumblr process, allows users to take content that someone else previously posted and copy it verbatim onto their own blogs. Because Tumblr automatically cites credit to a post’s original author, certain bloggers have been able to achieve significant cyber-fame (others, like Lady Gaga and President Obama, were famous to begin with; their followers come easy). Notes, which track how many users have “liked” or re-blogged a post, act as the site’s popularity currency.
Tumblr, for all its billions of posts, is still yet to reach the iconic status of its social networking rivals that are hallmarks of this era. Junior James Baker said that “I have no idea what it is” and junior Spencer Dean admits “I know of it but I don’t know anything about it.” (It is, however, popular enough to be blocked on the school computers). And like all successful enterprises, the site even has its haters. Junior Joseph Kunetz thinks that “blogging is the root of all evil. Who created Tumblr? Satan?”
Tumblr was actually created by a human (David Karp) in 2007, and many users think that its most appealing trait is that it acts as a means to explore one’s own human existence digitally. That’s a pretty big stigma for something that only exists on the internet, but as Molnar put it, “Tumblr is about how you express yourself.” A senior blogger summed up Tumblr’s use perfectly:
“When I’m feeling angsty about something, I don’t tweet about it to all my followers or post it as my Facebook status. I go on on Tumblr and find ten other people who feel the same way.”
For that reason, Tumblr stands as a rare website that is not entirely hollow and superficial in nature. Many blogs serve no greater purpose than a pictorial representation of their author’s consciousness, but Tumblr’s okay with that. In fact, that’s why it exists.
Click here to see what all the hype is about: www.tumblr.com
Check out the last time Neirad scoped out the social networking scene in Jack Rehm’s December Twitter article:
http://darienps.org/neirad/1112twitternames.php
