Tumblr’s political culture and method of communication fosters a convergent community with members hungry for news and trusting what their peers post as truth. Content inundation and faux-credibility, a byproduct of self-publishing on blogs, fosters pop activism in community members.
We watched video for class the day we discussed social media and its effects on composition. The quote that resonated the most for me was, “We no longer search for news, the news finds us.”
In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr cites a University College London study of online research habits, which found that most users who visited online research databases used “a form of skimming activity” rather than close, in-depth reading: “They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.”
Carr also cites Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates warns that writing will negatively affect intellect by making people lazy:
Tumblr blogging is most commonly an exercise in curation, rather than production of original content. Tumblr’s unique structure fosters community through its “reblog” feature. Similar to Twitter’s “retweet,” the reblog allows users to appropriate others’ content as their own. Though the reblogs usually attribute the content to the original poster, the content is still reflected on each user’s blog, and the content is meant to reflect the reblogger’s taste and ability to curate while requiring minimal effort and background knowledge.
With the state of print media, it’s easy to assume the rise of blogs is closely tied with the demise of traditional print journalism.This is because blogs’ rising popularity is also tied with our new social culture; everyone is constantly communicating with each other through the Internet (and new media, by extension). The blogosphere is essentially a giant soapbox for anyone with an wi-fi connection and something to say. It’s no surprise that with the accessibility of self-publishing, people are feeling they have more and more to say about current events.
I keep a personal blog hosted from Wordpress.com, which tries to foster a similar sense of community, but still falls short. They have recently created “like” and “reblog” features similar to Tumblr’s, but for whatever reason, Wordpress’s users’ focus is much more content-centered than community-centered.
In her essay, “Media and the Commodification of Crisis,” Lorna Roth describes North American culture “a culture of commodities, the commodification of culture; the transformation of politics into marketable packages.”
In his “Blogosphere: The New Political Arena,” Michael Keren describes a “cyberspace celebrity” Jason Kottke (of kottke.org), whose blog garnered a cult following in the early 2000s. A common theme in his blog was the threats he faced as a single, independent man, against big businesses. He rants about the implications behind share-a-penny cups in gas stations, but after raising such an issue for his readers, he does little to suggest a solution.
The perfect example of pop activism occurred on March 7, 2012, when Invisible Children launched a campaign called Kony 2012. The catalyst of the campaign was an extremely well-made video, created by Invisible Children’s director and founder, Jason Russell, which was released on YouTube on March 5, 2012.
