Читать книгу Tumblr - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 18

Features and functions of social media platforms can be thought of as “arrangements that mandate or enable an activity,” (Light et al. 2018: 891). Broadly, both features and functions have been defined as indications of what people can do with a thing. A feature is literally “what users can do with a technology” (Markus and Silver 2008: 612), while what an artifact is for – and it is arguably always for something – is the artifact’s function (Franssen et al. 2018). Social media platforms’ features (e.g., a “heart” button) communicate and suggest actions (e.g., clicking it) as well as an assortment of possible meanings of those actions (e.g., “if I click it, I like it” – see Bucher and Helmond 2017).

While there are many features and functions on tumblr that are similar to those on other social media platforms, there are also those that are unique to tumblr, and still others that were pioneered on tumblr before becoming pervasive across the social media ecosystem. We start with a discussion of what setting up and posting on tumblr is like. This takes us through a brief description and history of the features and functions that deprioritize the social graph and invite multimodality and personalization. We then discuss, in more detail, three clusters of features and functions that make tumblr stand out: (1) tumblr’s signature reblog, (2) the tumblr-unique format for hashtags, and (3) the unconventional features and functions for on-platform interaction.