Читать книгу Tumblr - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 14

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 lead to an emergence of a shared vernacular based on curatorial 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.