Читать книгу Tumblr - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 6

I found tumblr some time in 2010. I was reading a lot of fanfiction and many of the stories used images “from tumblr,” so I decided to find out what it meant. My first blog exists as twenty-five static snapshots in the Wayback Machine. Shutting down that first blog was a sudden and emotional decision and what remains of it fits. No coherent archive, rather a metaphorical stash of ticket stubs, candy wrappers, and phone numbers on stained napkins. My second blog is nine years old. My third and fourth were both set up for research. For each of these, I set up a new email address, and each is a new primary blog. This was the way of my first tumblr tribe, guided by a fervent commitment to avoiding context collapse.

–Katrin

I migrated sharing my personal “feels” and obsessions from music forums and sites like LiveJournal to posting diary-like fragments on tumblr. Those first posts are gone, manually deleted, but others endure. Each new blog marked a new project: excerpts from literature I loved, frustrated rants about the hardcore punk scene I was sort of in, screenshots of text conversations that were just too personal to go elsewhere. Like the boxes of letters, photos, and other personal archives under my bed, tumblr curates my passions and transformations. Now, my primary blog is too attached to a public early-20-something self, it is too exposing, not the tumblr self I am now. And yet this blog “follows” other blogs, this younger me, not the me in one of my active secondary blogs. I wish I could swap which blog is my primary.

–Natalie

I was introduced to tumblr when I mentored a group of teenage girls in my youth group in 2008. My main blog is the most respectable of the lot, but then one day I got bored and stopped updating it. But this “old life” still haunts me every time I open my tumblr mobile app, because my main blog is still linked to another twenty-three side blogs. Where I post depends on my mood in the moment. In one, I diary my grief from missing my sister; in another, I curate pretty pictures based on themes (fluffy birds, clouds at sunset, anime foods); still others are memory capsules, like the time I made a post every day for a month as a gift to a friend. Fingers crossed I never lose my phone and have my tumblr lives exposed.

–Crystal