The problem with tumblelogging
Prashanth Kamalakanthan doesn’t think tumblelogs are a particularly useful thing to spend time on:
It’s happened often enough now that I felt I’d finally use this new medium to talk about it. Just the fact that I can do this, sit down and write, is something that’s nigh impossible with the tumblelog platform. For the unacquainted, Tumblr is something of a del.icio.us dump with a design, as put by Revista in his abandonment of tumblelogging. It’s not only that that bothers me now; I love del.icio.us. The problem is that Tumblr advertises their platform as “the easiest way to share yourself.” That’s a lie.
It’s not even realistic to think that a series of pictures, links, and reblogged content (which is heavily endorsed by Tumblr) is “sharing yourself.” No, that’s just like someone looking through the history of books you’ve checked out at the library and thinking that they know you. Nothing posted on a tumblelog is original content. Tumbleloggers are a bunch of people sitting on the internet, expending just enough effort to click a button on their bookmarks toolbar and typing in “Awesome, found on Digg.” And through that, you’re “sharing yourself.”
One of these days I’m gonna coin a nice new word to describe this sort of thinking. For now, let’s call it virtue thinking. It’s the sort of thinking that says that if there is something, a thing, a kind of project, then there is a virtuous way, a one true way to do it. So if you were a virtue thinker and stumbled onto tumblelogs, you would immediately assume there was one true way to do it. Every other way would simply be deviant, a changeling, the exception that proves the rule. This is the first faulty assumption in “The problem with tumblelogging”: that there is only one way to do it. In reality, people use their tumblelogs for as varied purposes as they do regular blogs.
From this flows, for instance, “nothing posted on a tumblelog is original content”—I don’t care to prove it wrong, because it’s blatantly, obviously, right-in-your-face wrong.
But there are other faults. Is Tumblr the easiest way to share yourself? Of course not. The easiest way to share yourself is to go out and share yourself. Talk to people, be around them. But in context, on the web? Closer. Others have pointed out that this is closer to the way organically grown, real-world relationships are formed than the traditional blog: we talk about our interests, we do stuff together (analogous to posting stuff, reblogging, inter-tumblelog discussion, IRC (ever come to #tumblrs, Prashant?)). We don’t present each other as one-way monologues. We certainly don’t present ourselves as a long list of monologues, one after the other, in reverse chronological order, with links that say “comments (10)” or “share on digg!”.
Of course, it’s also a bit tumblr-centric. I keep referring to Anarchaia, the tumblelog which started it all. I’ve been following it for a couple of years (it’s not hosted on tumblr). I love it. I’ve never met Chris, not even fired away any emails with him, but I still have a pretty good idea of his interests. Since they overlap considerably (but certainly not fully) with mine, and since he frequents parts of the web I don’t, I have a fresh store of interesting links on topics I find interesting that I most likely haven’t seen before every night. How is that not adding to “the experience of say, sifting through del.icio.us pages, looking through top Dugg stories, or even just mindlessly using StumbleUpon”?
Which brings me to what I see my tumblelog, Anarchaia, and some other good tumblelogs as (kottke has evolved into a kind of tumblelog, for instance).
I see myself as an editor of the web. More specifically, the part of the web that I frequent. The websites I visit. I also pick up references to web-stuff through offline reading. All this is condensed, every day, into a list of what I find interesting. I also take context seriously. I comment on everything, even if it’s just to add the author’s name. I provide opinions. I see others reblogging my posts and removing some of the extra context, opinions and so on in them; I don’t know if they’re lame, or just irrelevant, or if you disagree with them, but you’ll have to live with them.
The editor has an important role which the Zetahydrae article drastically understates. Even if the editor provides no original content on his own (and, as mentioned above and as I’ll come back to, that is strictly not true of tumblelogs), the edited product has a value in itself. No one in their right mind would suggest all newspapers fire their editors because their jobs adds no value to the papers. Selecting what content to publish, and what parts of it, is in itself a worthwhile job.
Which brings me back to original content. Is commentary not original content? I comment what I post, mostly, unless it’s a quote that stands by itself, which is rare. That is original content. I also write: this entire post is original content.
So it’s not really true that tumbleloggers don’t add value, or don’t create original content. Further, as I mentioned in the introduction, if we ignore virtue thinking and acknowledge that tumbling, as other activities, means different things to different people at different times and in different contexts, we can see that Tumblr (which is what the article attacks, really) isn’t just a tumblelog platform, it’s easy to use it as an old-style blog, without comments, and, as Jason Kottke remarks, reminiscient of an “older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere”.
So there you have it. I’m editor of the internet. That’s pretty cool, I think.
There is, of course, a lot to agree with if you read the article as commenting on a certain type of tumblelog, but really, that’s not how it reads. That’s how I wish it read.
