#its like claiming Tumblr sucks because the content is mostly user-regulated | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

t--amodernicarus · 1 year

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Click "Read More" (May not be complete due to Tumblr's restraints. Completed bibliography turned in separately).

This article, written by a collection of researchers, focuses on the culture surrounding Tumblr that promotes self-harm. The article deeply discusses how social media can push people to self-harm by creating a culture that is not sympathetic to the illness but one that actually promotes the illness. The article claims that there is a large community of self-harmers that are connected through discourse on Tumblr, relating to each other through the way their acts are vilified and infamous within the grander community of Tumblr. The article also claims that Tumblr’s regulation of certain hashtags (such as #ed or #selfharm) continues to promote this culture. By “silencing” this community, it only encourages them to look for alternative ways to post, making the community even tighter. This is because only those with an “in” to the community can even find it.

This article is an anthropological article that has been peer-reviewed and has its methodology listed plainly. Furthermore, the article does not list names or usernames when discussing the events taking place. This article is useful as it helps to give context and reasoning as to why the communities on Tumblr are so tight-knit and have been able to resist multiple bannings and censoring of keywords. The authors provide a wide and detailed study that is a great resource for my project.

Fyfe, Melissa. “Rise and Fall of Jess Miller's Pizza Empire.” The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 May 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/rise-and-fall-of-jess-millers-pizza-empire-20160512-gotftv.html.

Griffith, Frances J., and Catherine H. Stein. “Behind the Hashtag: Online Disclosure of Mental Illness and Community Response on Tumblr.” American Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 67, no. 3/4, June 2021, pp. 419–32. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12483.

This article examines personal accounts of mental illness through hashtags like #depression or #mental illness. The article explores the tendencies of Tumblr users to post about their illnesses and about how these postings can create subcultures and communities that revolve around propagating mental illness, not combatting it. The article talks about how the rates of Tumblr users who post about mental illness (by “post,” the author means more of a romanticization of illness, not awareness) increase when paired with a community that encourages that type of behavior. This way, the author shows how subcultures arise because of Tumblr and why they become so popular. This article can also show the detriment of these subcultures and how users can get sucked into difficult behaviors to maintain a community.

This is a peer-reviewed scholarly article written through the lens of psychology to observe the effects of these subcultures. It uses personal experiences, accounts, and public blog posts of 14,626 Tumblr users disclosing ten different mental health diagnoses using hashtags. This article is useful to me because, like the NSFW subculture, the mentally ill subculture is another window into how Tumblr propagates specific and unique cultures and the effects these subcultures have on the site's culture as a whole.

Nipples, Memes, and Algorithmic Failure: NSFW Critique of Tumblr ... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444820979280.

This article discusses the banning of adult content on Tumblr, mostly in regard to the destruction of valuable subcultures on Tumblr, but also about the ways that Tumblr users resisted this ban. The article claims that Tumblr’s automatic filter does more harm than good, as it not only deleted adult content but unrelated pictures, like those of fully clothed people. The claim that Tumblr was banning “female-presenting nipples” also sparked many controversies, and the article talks heavily about the backlash Tumblr faced from its users because of this banning. The article also talks about the “memes” that came from these bans and how, even with the destruction of so many subcultures, more subcultures came to take their place.

This is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal in which methodology and research are clearly defined and available for the reader. The article uses “7306 posts made between November 2018 (when Tumblr announced its new content policy) and August 2019 (when Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic),” to base its findings around and provides a myriad of video and photo sources. This source is valuable to me because it discusses not only culture and community on Tumblr but also the failure of the Tumblr algorithm and how resilient these cultures can be.

“The Downward Spiral of a Tumblr User Ligaturemarkings.” YouTube, YouTube, 9 Oct. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLarLdHA-NE

“The Evolution of the Tumblr Girl.” YouTube, YouTube, 28 Mar. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1TF7pcYePw.

“The Fatphobia of Early 2010s Tumblr.” YouTube, YouTube, 7 Mar. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKhmwRwHjtU

This video goes in-depth about the fatphobia and shaming that was heavily incorporated into the culture of early 2010’s Tumblr. This video talks about cultural moments in history that shape the culture of Tumblr, such as the formation of boybands and the 2008 recession. The creator, Jessica Blair, also mentions that beauty gurus were immensely popular during this time and uses personal anecdotes and experiences to convey her message. She speaks about certain aesthetics that were popular at the time and how these aesthetics might affirm the biased ideas against fat people at the time. She claims that in the early 2010s Tumblr, thinness was everything and that almost every trend or clothing aesthetic that circulated at the time excluded fat people and promoted almost unhealthy thinness. Blair also talks about eating disorders on Tumblr, the normalization and glamorization of anorexia, and how brands like Brandy Melville helped to romanticize being thin. Blair also talks briefly about the domination of whiteness in this era and how fatphobia is linked to racism, specifically toward black women.

This source is a well-documented video in which the author uses scholarly articles and personal accounts to prove her claims. Blair uses direct photos and quotes from Tumblr accounts that were popular during the early 2010s and references many possible outside influences that affected the culture of thinness at the time. This video is useful to me because it is a highly detailed account of not just a certain time in Tumblr’s history but also of a specific detrimental culture being promoted. Blair also gives many examples of pivotal cultural aspects of the time outside of Tumblr, which can help me understand how certain times and actions change how culture manifests on Tumblr.

“The Story of the 20,000 Dollar Furry Commission.” YouTube, YouTube, 18 Jan. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTHgEV-xUSg.

“The Tumblr Era Is Back...and We Should Be Worried.” YouTube, YouTube, 27 Sept. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fz30qZ35UY.

“The Tumblr Exodus.” YouTube, YouTube, 8 June 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyekDJU2iOY.

Tiidenberg, Katrin. "Boundaries and Conflict in a NSFW Community on Tumblr: The Meanings and Uses of Selfies." New Media & Society, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814567984 Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

This article also talks about banning adult content on Tumblr and the culture surrounding selfies or “self-shooting,” as the author calls it. The main goal of this article is to explore how selfies affirm, destroy, change, or conceptualize community and culture, specifically through the lens of “NSFW” (not safe for work, a phrase that refers to pornographic or gory material) photos. The article also talks about how the banning of NSFW content from Tumblr affected the subculture of “self-shot” pornography and what this ban meant in the grand scheme of the overall Tumblr community. It goes in-depth on a very specific community and culture, defining the good and bad parts while maintaining a sense of neutralism.

This is a peer-reviewed article published in a scholarly journal, and like the others, it serves as an ethnographic, anthropological study. The study uses various “not safe for work” examples from personal blogs with original content or blogs that recirculate content and provides a detailed section describing their methodology. This source is useful for me because it provides another and objectively unique look into the ban on adult content and provides a specific and centralized community and culture that was effective. It also defines a huge cultural moment in Tumblr’s history that had a lot of affects on Tumblr as a whole.

“‘Tumblr Is Dominated by America:" A Study of Linguistic and Cultural Differences in Tumblr Transnational Fandom.” Taylor & Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714421.2022.2126589

This article focuses on the dominance of American culture on Tumblr, specifically through the lens of linguistics and how non-Americans are affected by this Western domination. This article analyzes non-American fans’ engagement with Tumblr and explores the motivations of non-English speakers and non-Americans to join Tumblr. The article builds on the idea that websites are extremely large cultural spaces and explores the differences between communities produced by English-speaking American users and transnational users. The article discusses the idea of “transcultures,” what blended cultures look like, and how social media sites propagate and encourage blending even the most distinct cultures.

This is a peer-reviewed article with the methodology clearly and boldly listed, and the author is participating in ethnographic research in the field of anthropology. The study uses interviews with 19 Tumblr users, both transnational and American fans, to accurately study these blended cultures. This article is useful because it allows me to garner proven examples of how Tumblr affects and morphs cultures and communities. This also shows that Tumblr is a site that is not just significant in Western cultures (ie. America) but also in many parts of the world. I talk a lot about the blending of subcultures within Tumblr, and this article really helped me understand how cultures become blended and what the overall effects of these blended cultures are.

TumblrMart – Help Center. https://help.tumblr.com/hc/en-us/articles/7467765335575-TumblrMart.

“Tumblr.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Apr. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr.

“Why Tumblr Died so Quickly.” YouTube, YouTube, 4 Sept. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUriEoFfUc. “Tumblr.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Apr. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr. “Why Was Tumblr so Queer ?” YouTube, YouTube, 21 Nov. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvlLrd-BKW0.

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