Tumblr – the safest space
A love letter to Tumblr
Reanar James
It seems as if social media is advancing faster than most can keep up. The devices once designed so aptly to fit our hands now feel practically destined to outgrow us. Of course, it doesn’t help that the Internet makes an already big world overwhelmingly vaster, requiring work and energy to digest our feeds. Each day I come in contact with content on timelines that makes my day less joyful, and somehow I still feel compelled to scroll—it’s a neverending cycle. We log on, we watch, we grimace, we laugh, and then we sleep. We continue to feed the machine until we remember to put the phone down and “touch some grass”, a phrase that feels so uniquely online and has existed for decades before the Internet was ever around.
However, as contradictory as it sounds, I’ve found that I feel the most in touch with the real world when I’m on Tumblr. Compared to other apps where it feels like I have to engage in a performance of “better self” to keep up, Tumblr is a place where all those formalities wash away upon login.
Tumblr is true serenity to me. I find that other social media platforms are deluged in current topics, trivial hypotheticals and endless cyclical discourse, and my Tumblr dashboard is almost entirely exempt from that world. The apparent peace on Tumblr comes from its lack of noisiness and the need to keep up with trends. The antithesis of Twitter at its crux, Tumblr serves as an escape from that realm online. Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr in 2013 and the porn ban in 2018 have completely transformed the site — most of Tumblr’s users from its 2010 prime left the platform, making the site quiet and less, you know, Tumblr-y.
We once associated Tumblr as the grounds for your run-of-the-mill postmodern teen or young adult, egregious in their virtue-signalling and performative politics. We can thank mid-2010 Tumblr users for what we now know as cancel culture: the writing off of influential people if they’ve been “problematic”. The pipeline started from the infamous Your Fave Is Problematic blog and arrived at Kanye West being banned from Twitter. But on the whole, it is up to debate whether “cancel culture” is a real thing that can have a tangible effect on rich people with mass influence, and the concept’s origin strongly reinforces this argument on Tumblr. Fan-based social spaces are small communities we’ve built for ourselves, and typically, the fans of the content are held accountable instead of the content producers themselves. When “vengeful public shaming” blogs were our primary source of public or celebrity critique on the site, it sequentially shamed the users firsthand. It ultimately did not improve the content — the main issue at hand. It is essential to be critical of the people you idolise and the products you consume, especially if they’re a person and a product all at once, but in reality, cancel culture has devolved to making mass panic out of non-issues while barely affecting the wealthy, influential people committing the worst of offences. Within a mainstream culture, we should aim to aid each other in our progression where we can. It is best to educate rather than denigrate—this begins with educating yourself.
Perhaps this is when Tumblr transformed: users realised that it is essential to mediate their intellectualism with human compassion and compassion for the self. It feels like a collective burnout and powerful healing took place around 2015 when everybody gravitated off the site for various reasons. Tumblr went from pretentious to considerate; resources are shared amply and generously. “Aesthetic” is a huge facet of what it means to still have a Tumblr. As they always have, Tumblr users value art and beauty. There is a small community of “aesthetic” lovers on TikTok posting archival content or beautiful pictures and videos from cities, countries, or homes. Aesthetics can be just as nice to explore and share on TikTok, but the difference lies in the assumed emptiness that comes with sharing on the app for follows and likes rather the genuine beauty. Whether in written form, gorgeous photography, or vintage interiors, the lack of noise allows Tumblr to be a better version of what it always was: a place for art, enthusiasm, and connection.
This passion can manifest itself in quippy musings regarding mundane or difficult experiences regarding the human condition. A post that resonated with me comes from Tumblr user howelljenkins, “to love and be loved is to rest”. This is why I love Tumblr: the culmination of the art, intellect, and newfound compassion has brought about these soft, magical personal posts. It is very dreamy to reblog, post something glib or read a powerful Richard Siken poem and feel inspired and relaxed.
Information is summarised and condensed to be digestible for other apps, especially Instagram, where the most ill-informed infographics go viral. Specifically, during the pandemic, misinformation about racism or COVID spread quickly, encouraging ignorance and eco-fascism. TikTok does the same, where elaborate concepts are bludgeoned into something quicker to digest. TikTok seems to foster an appetite for more in-depth conversation, especially since the introduction of 3-minute videos on queerness and gender politics. However, the need to summarise and shorten stops those conversations from being complete. For example, there was once an active conversation about whether lesbians can identify as male or use he/him pronouns, but the videos and the comments do not allow for the depth of this conversation to be adequately explored. There are so many resources on the verisimilitude of the lesbian experience, past and present, that are all valid as they all respectively reinforce collective lesbian identity. It is hardly a one-and-done conversation, yet there is never enough space or time for subtleties on these apps. The main incentive for these apps is to appeal to the mass short attention span, fulfilling the primary purpose of selling products to their users, whether this is a lifestyle, a person, an identity or an actual item.
Additionally, reading comprehension, media literacy, and other critical thinking skills aren’t necessarily required to thrive on Twitter and Instagram as these apps gratify short attention spans with quick content — elaboration is not a priority as much as the social aspect, which is why reactions to critique tend to be so immediate and caustic. Of course, it would be great if everyone could use social media to socialise and share photos or Reels or get on Spaces and have a peaceful day, but then they wouldn’t be the chaotic apps we know them as, right? Yet, we still seek out this ravenous discourse and virtual chaos to feed the dopamine beast.
Alas, there is a time for chaos, and there is a time for peace. Tumblr is now the closest thing to peace we have online. We relax our minds and spirits in a space where its sole purpose isn’t to appeal to an algorithm in which you have no direct control making it discernibly harder to curate what you want to interact with. Of course, Tumblr has its downsides regarding advertising and unwanted interactions (the Instagram block and restriction settings reign superior in this regard). Still, for the most part, in comparison to all other primary forms of social media, it is the safest space.
