“In [Tricia] Wang’s theory, a network like Facebook, which enforces real name registration and consists of a person’s friends and family from time immemorial, encourages bounded use. It’s like the small town you never left, the grammar school class you couldn’t pass out of, the first dead-end job. It’s a network mired in past and present, and by its nature it enforces a limited sense of identity and expression. By contrast, something like Tumblr encourages unbounded use. It allows you to experiment and play. It’s the big city, and each new tumblelog you create is like a new bar or neighborhood where you can try on a new self and see how it fits. In one instant you can be a pug lover, reblogging the best animated GIFs of the flat-faced dogs. In the next, you can dive deep into the Go Pro snowboarding community and post snaps from your latest run. Hence Wang’s notion of the elastic self. Like rubber bands, when we step into Tumblr we can stretch and reshape ourselves into different configurations. Each new hat we try on stretches the rubber band just a little bit further, and over time it might evolve into a new configuration. This allows for remarkable opportunities to explore different potentials of self and self-expression.”
—From An Xiao Mina’s The Social Ties That Unbind
Anybody paying attention to the history of Tumblr GIF culture needs to look through the archive of RonenV.
all.ronenv.comA lot of the forms and styles we now attribute to other gifmakers, Ronen was doing in 08-09.
He also did a lot of early experimentation in using gifs as a medium for storytelling.
See also: http://all.ronenv.com/tagged/gif/chrono
Ronen’s badass.
We Tracked Down Our Biggest Troll… and Kind of Liked Him
motherjones.comEver wonder what an internet troll is like in person? We met one in his lair.
“This whole sassiness thing – everything's got to be sarcastic, everything's got to be knowing, everything's got to be cynical. You've got to be on top of your shit twenty-four hours a day. THAT is exhausting. It's just far better to go, you know what? I'm just basically a monkey in a dress, and the best I can hope for every day is just to be nice, to smile as much as possible, to be gentle, try and be a bit understanding, work really hard, go and smell some flowers, have a cup of tea, ring your mum if you get on with her, just kind of dial it down a bit. ”
—Caitlin Moran
“Friedrich Nietzsche established the “declaring things dead” form, when—after trying about 400 other aphorisms in The Gay Science—he struck gold with “God is dead” in 1882. Fifty percent hyperbole, 50 percent trolling. Well played, Nietzsche.”
—From “Declaring Things Dead is Dead” Via Slate.
Existentialists were pioneers of trolling.
Why Tumblr needs to fix its transparency problem
dailydot.comAre Tumblr’s transparency issues just poor organization, or a symptom of something more troublesome?
While yesterday’s tag search fiasco could be simply an issue of a glitch quickly fixed, it seems that Tumblr could have benefited from a quick update to its staff or support blogs to inform users about what was happening.
Instead, the lack of transparency points to a larger elephant in the room: Tumblr’s sudden stagnation in the face of tremendous growth.
In the last year, Tumblr quadrupled its userbase from 20 million blogs in late 2011 to 103 million as of this week. With over 70 million posts and reblogs a day, the growth of Tumblr is nothing short of staggering. After its latest round of venture capital, Tumblr is valued at somewhere around $1 billion.
Instead of expanding its functionality and communicating more with its userbase, however, Tumblr seems to have grown even more reticent and has alarmingly halted many of its services.
In addition to last week’s much talked-about closure of Storyboard, Tumblr’s award-winning editorial branch, Betabeat noted that Tumblr’s leadership has been floundering recently, characterized by a revolving door of executives around CEO David Karp. In addition to the Storyboard layoffs, Tumblr has seen a long line of departmental heads come and go—most recently the executive vice president and vice president of engineering.
And it’s not only Storyboard that’s fallen abruptly silent: Gifwich, Tumblr’s in-house GIF blog, abruptly stopped updating two weeks ago. Reblorg, Tumblr’s official hub for spotlighting user’s original works, hasn’t been updated in five months. Yet no official announcement about either of these projects has come from Tumblr. [READ MORE]
Some people say that the internet has created a more angry, selfish, aggressive culture.
I disagree.
Today alone I have experienced so much through the internet that has revealed more support, goodwill, and empathy than would never be possible without such a large, international network.
There’s this interview with author John Green about his new book, which was inspired by his work with child cancer patients and his encounter with Esther Earl, another cancer patient that passed away recently, whom he met through the online community that he created with his brother. The community itself is an excellent example of the kind of positive support that I’m talking about, but I’m choosing to focus on his interview in particular because John says this: “…in 2008 I met a young woman who had cancer who was a reader of my books, and through knowing her it became possible to write that story.”
Then there’s this blog post by Jenny Lawson, who recently, tentatively admitted to performing self-harm, which is something that’s difficult to live with (to put it mildly) and even more difficult to confess. The post that I’ve linked to is the post that she wrote in the aftermath, out of gratitude to the many, many, many people who wrote her emails, comments, and tweets of support and appreciation. If that’s not a positive effect of the internet, then I don’t know what is.
I think people have a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of the internet simply because it’s so easy to do so. The internet hasn’t made people more angry, selfish, or aggressive, it’s just made them more vocal. I could open any site with a comments feature right now and find any number of negative, vicious comments. They’re highly visible and numerous, which is why they’re easy to focus on, but what people forget is that these comments hold no weight in the world. They were written in a flash of hatred and adrenaline and will disappear just as quickly.
What will last are things like John Green’s book, the real life community brought about by the Green brothers’ virtual community, and the positive effects on Jenny Lawson’s life brought about by her readers. People have been able to reach out to others, to achieve lifelong dreams, and to create all kinds of art that is shared with millions of people every day because of the internet.
In closing, I just like the internet okay. I think it’s like pretty cool and junk, and uh that’s a bunch of reasons why.
“The Internet is creating markets that enable us to own much less. The winner of the ebook sweepstakes will be the bookseller who becomes a bookrenter. I don’t want to own hundreds of books on a Kindle at $10 a pop. I want to Netflix them — pay for access to every book ever published. I’d rather be a renter in Borges’ library than the owner of my own.”
—Wired, Abandon Ownership! Join the Rentership Society!Electracy
en.wikipedia.orgElectracy describes the kind of “literacy” or skill and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social software, and virtual worlds. According to theorist Gregory Ulmer, electracy “is to digital media what literacy is to print.” (via meinong)
I was looking through Google for an old article that I couldn't find
And I came across a quasi-popular post that made the rounds a few months ago that was a sort of incoherent critique of a post I had written that I suppose some people disagreed with. The initial post was pretty vitriolic/personal, and it had been a while since I’d seen something of that nature, so I looked through the notes.
I was surprised to see a decent handful of people I know on Tumblr, people I know personally, and people I have worked with or am connected to professionally mocking me in a really sort of sick way. A lot of things like “I love making fun of her,” “She is not a genuine person, she has a superiority complex about her readers” and things of that nature. Really pathetic stuff.
At first, I was inclined to respond to them in some way, and even got close to reblogging something. It’s easy to let things like this get to you and make you feel as though you are in a fight with people — and that they have already got in the first swing without you realizing it. I came up with what I estimate to be a fairly witty little comeback and hoped that it would make for maximum effect against the people I felt were cowardly and dishonest for making fun of me in such a way when, to my face (and when it was potentially beneficial for them) they have always been so nice.
The truth is that, as you progress in any media field, you will get people who do this kind of thing. The only difference is that, as you move up the invisible chain, they’ll be less cavalier about doing it to your face.
I’m not stupid. I know that I have people who, because of the media “cliques” they run in (this is so sad to even type out, we are grown adults and yet this is really how it works) are bound to be talking shit about me and the publication I work for behind my back. I don’t live with some false notion that everyone is my friend and is unequivocally supportive of/happy for me. Even if it would be nice to imagine.
I have gotten used to the idea that people will make gross assumptions about me as a person, and will cut me down at any opportunity to make a few quick notes off of other people’s schadenfreude. (I found more than one person who dedicates at least a post or two per week of highlighting and making fun of something I write here or elsewhere.)
In some ways, you take it as a compliment. At the risk of sounding pretentious (and I know it will, but it is also true), there is absolutely a part of them that is jealous. Without exception, the most vocal of this minority is the group which aspires to be writers of some kind themselves. Whether or not they like the kind of writing I do, they dislike the fact that I get to be a professional writer and they do not. They feel more deserving, and feel personally slighted by my success. Of course, by extension, they are also saying that the people who make my writing popular have bad or simple taste, but I’m sure they’re condescending enough to already know that.
One of the things I try to do in all of my work and personal blogging is to never make fun of another person for my expense. I might tease a general group, or talk about trends that I see, but I don’t take another writer and drag them through the mud for other people to laugh at. I don’t have people who I “love to make fun of” behind their back. And this is because, among other things, I feel very grateful for what I have. I am so happy to do what I love every day and meet so many wonderful people who share my thoughts on a million different subjects. I love opening my emails and reading hundreds of stories of young women and men all over the world who are going through some of the very same things I am. I feel, often, like the luckiest person in the world, and I don’t want to tarnish that or jeopardize it by building even a small percentage of my personal “brand” on shitting on one of my colleagues.
I get so many messages and emails every day about what people can do to start or build a career in writing. And I believe that one of the most important things, beyond just writing as much as possible and developing the talents you find that you have, is being diplomatic. It’s being a kind person to other people and not using another person’s humiliation as an opportunity for just the tiniest bit of gain on your part. Because this is a huge part of media culture right now — the callouts which become name-calling which become plain-old hate. People get off and get noticed by saying terrible things about one another. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s childish.
You’ll note that almost none of the people who are writing these incredibly mean things on a regular basis (about myself or anyone else) have achieved a serious level of professional success. It’s pretty standard knowledge that, in the professional world, there is a certain level of decorum, even about people you dislike. And if your pastime is saying things like this about others, few people are going to want to interact with you in a visible way.
Don’t participate in this. Be the kind of person who uses their platform and influence to find new writers to put forward, or to give advice, or to promote something they think is cool. Making fun of culture or TV or the internet or whatever is fine and great and necessary, but don’t start making fun of a peer. Don’t start making sport out of talking trash. Because people notice it, and they can feel the bitterness oozing from every pore, and can even sometimes read (yes, people really do write this) “this publication rejected me and now I’m going to shit-talk them at every opportunity.”
I am not a perfect person by any means. But I have a clean conscience, and I don’t think that I would be able to write publicly if I didn’t. I don’t go to sleep on edge, waiting for the new thing to make fun of or to see if someone responded to my vitriol. Sure, I might write things that are tone-deaf or insensitive or wrong. And I’m always here to hear about it and learn from my mistakes and get better. But my time is not spent grabbing at the ankles above me to try and get a foothold — and I have no respect for people who do. Neither should you.
So I just want to say thank you to all of the people I follow and know and hear from who are kind and respectful and use their voice for positivity. The vast majority of the things I hear and see are incredibly kind and uplifting and deserve to be heard more. The internet often does not reward people who refrain from rampant shit-talk, but that doesn’t mean everyone should start attending the Perez Hilton School of Public Relations.
Keep being kind.
No one can promise you anything in life, but know that, whatever you do achieve, you’ll feel good about your journey when you finally get there.
