Anyway, here’s another instalment in our current special series featuring Tumblr and fan studies researchers’ personal and scholarly reactions to the Tumblrpocalypse. Today we have Lori Morimoto, whom you can find on here as @tea-and-liminality.
“My main concern is the effect it may have on the transnationality/transculturality of media fandoms as they currently exist on the site. Tumblr’s foregrounding of the visual – and, in particular, fan art – has opened up alternative lines of communication between fans from different cultural/language backgrounds that, in circumventing text, have really transformed "fandom” as we talk about it. Places like deviantArt and Japan’s Pixiv (and a host of other Chinese sites) have some of that cross-cultural quality, but the sense of belonging in a given fan community through visual contributions has been fairly unique to Tumblr. I know some of that transculturality has shifted to Twitter, but I wonder if this will ultimately lead to a kind of cultural resegregation in media fandoms going forward.“