This week I want to do a bit of a review of fan studies work on everyone’s favorite hellsite, Tumblr. Key works include a tumblr book: platform and cultures edited by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch (University of Michigan, 2020), tumblr by Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin (Polity 2021), and the Roundtable on Tumblr and Fandom that Lori Morimoto hosted in the Symposium section of TWC.
Today’s excerpt will be from “Tumblr Fan Aesthetics” by Louisa Stein (published in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, Routledge, 2017.)
From the start, some key elements of Tumblr appeared to align well with fannish concerns. From its initial entry in 2007, Tumblr offered users the ability to share visual images, still and moving, combined with limited text, in what seemed like a fresh aesthetic, although in truth it had evolved from prior platforms Projectionst and Anarchia (Alfonso). With its unfamiliar and somewhat opaque-to-outsiders interface, Tumblr felt less policed in comparison with fans’ perception of LJ after Strikethrough. Tumblr’s seeming illegibility to outsiders, while a deterrent for some fans, also functioned as part of its appeal. Like LJ, users navigated Tumblr via hyperlinked interests, but Tumblr’s user-driven tagging practice seemed more excessive and disorganized, sometimes even put to expressive rather than organizational purposes (e.g. a hashtag might read #ilovethisshowsomuch). Tumblr seemed to offer a coded public, in which individual authorship was subsumed into the collective, and within which transgressive meanings could hide in plain sight.
Tumblr’s reblogging logic, in which a user could easily “reblog” any post they find onto their own dashboard, with or without the addition of notes, resonated with fan practices of return, recirculation, and transformative reworking. Posts on Tumblr could be reposted tens of thousands of times, giving them the weight of community-held beliefs or community-hailed icons. This recirculation and reworking of cultural meaning meshed with fandom’s valuing of transformative reworking and repeating of tropes and beloved images. Tumblr’s particular brand of reblogging also resonated with fandom’s emphasis on a multiplicity of interpretations and affective returns to beloved media objects. Moreover, retumbling suggested a copyright stance that embraced the collective creative repurposing of already existing media, a core value for much of fandom (Rodrigo). Indeed, Tumblr’s emphasis on collective authorship yielded a sense of power in multiplicity, including the power to evade cultural policing.