Читать книгу Tumblr - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 13

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.