The Real World Is Over Now
One of my two “final” college projects was this essay about ‘representing the self’ and Tumblr. It was written for the English department.
I also wrote a reported feature about Tumblr, the company, for the Journalism department (or institute, or whatever). More on that later.
Just thought I’d put this somewhere in case I ever want to link to it. A PDF is here. I got an A- on this paper, which I think is alright. Click through to read.
The Real World is Over Now:
tumbling yr self onto the screen
The Way We Do It Now
Who has time to blog? Who cares about your blog? In a media landscape where you and I and everyone we know are being bombarded with pieces of information on television, in print, and on the internet (in tweets, blog posts, photos, emails, YouTube videos, Facebook status updates, Foursquare checkins…) the compulsion to construct a cohesive narrative from it all sort of gets lost in the shuffle. Why put together a carefully constructed, thoroughly hyperlinked, well-referenced, SEO-enhanced blog post when everyone’s already aware of all the pieces?
Consider the New Media Landscape™ distribution path of a news story. The break might first be reported by a normal guy, on Twitter. That tweet will be retweeted around the world by hundreds of Twitter users before any major news organization gets onboard. Then that news organization will stick it up on their Twitter, and as a banner on their website, and on the ticker on their television properties. Their newswriters scurry to create a well-researched story for the TV and internet audiences. By this time, tens of thousands of people have commented briefly on the significance and scope of the item on Twitter and Facebook, or privately by email or text message. By the time a news organization gets a full story online, the connected public has already heard it all. And so, by the time Joe Public can sit down at his laptop and link to everything and write a few thoughts and opinions, the internet has moved on. Nobody cares about your blog.
In the New Media Landscape, writing a blog post is about as irrelevant to the mobile web as printed newspapers were in the Slightly Less New Media Landscape – when we got our news from news websites. And so unless you’re developing something that requires some historical sequencing and innovative argumentation (like, say, the piece you’re reading right now), blogging is just too slow for the new speed of life.
A brief aside
I realize, obviously, that there are leagues of people who have yet to catch up to this New Media Landscape, or realize that it is approaching. To those people, I say: 70% of content read online by people under 40 was written by someone they know. It appears the web is no longer a place where the powers-that-be create content that is directly consumed by isolated masses. It is fast becoming a massive conversation about ourselves. It’s the real world social network writ large. Get used to it.
Tumblelogging
In 2005, aware of the content overload, some forward-thinking bloggers stopped writing their old-school thinking to the internet, constructing and writing and editing everything, and started to use their blog space for short thoughts, found content, remaindered links and photos, portions of overheard conversations – lots of little stuff. “A quick and dirty stream of consciousness,” web guru Jason Kottke would later call it.
The effect of these types of sites is sort of remarkably harmonious. In the old model of blogging, it could often feel like every blog was in an isolation chamber, separately deriving the same arguments and historical context. You could read five posts on the same topic from different blogs and each would be thoroughly hyperlinked to older, nearly identical posts to provide context, so that nobody would ever be lost, and all history would be in its right place. With that formality of history, removed, though – that is, with the assumed expectation that readers know how to Google things, or are reading often enough that they know the background - tumblelogging represented a shift toward a massive, streaming, history-free conversation. Their posts provide pieces to a puzzle that readers should put together, creating an easier writing job for the blogger, who has other things to worry about than rewriting and reestablishing context for his imagined devoted readership.
In 2007, 21-year-old David Karp ventured to make the process a little easier even by founding Tumblr, a devoted platform for creating and following tumblelogs. (Yes, there have been other services devoted to the practice, but Tumblr is far and away the most successful.) Something about the ease of use and freedom from old-news constraints of print-like pieces attracted the early adopter public, and Tumblr had about 100,000 users in a matter of weeks. Not three years later, over four million people are using the service with alarming and unusual regularity; the site sees two million posts per day. The new way has touched a nerve in the internet public.
Sidebar
When you go to sign up for an account on Tumblr, you go to tumblr.com and see this:
Fill in three fields, and you can make your first post. No more information is required. The rest is up to you.
On a “traditional” blog site, like Blogger, the signup process looks like this:
(this is page 1 of 3 in the registration process)
The barriers to entry here are significantly higher, and just add more layers of internet bureaucracy and information-gathering between “I want to blog” and “I have a blog.”
Point two: to create a post on Tumblr, you simply choose one of the presets:
On Blogger, the process is predictably harder and less intuitive.
Traditional blogging platforms try too hard to make a real-world metaphor work on the internet (you are publishing something with a title and formatting – just as if you were creating something to be printed). Tumblelogs realize that the internet can work in a different way than any previous medium, by combining all previous media. Why restrict ourselves to weird constraints that no longer limit us?
Mapping the Digital to the “real”
There was a time when the readiest old-school analogue for a blog was a diary (after all, some of the most popular blogging services embrace the parallel: Livejournal, Open Diary, even Facebook to some extent). For a time, the vast majority of blogs consisted of very diary-like entries: on Xanga and Livejournal, people still write about the minutiae of their lives and construct narratives very much like a classic diary, with dated, cohesive entries that drop names, places, and events. It brought the private space of the diary into the public sphere: very much an internet-exclusive activity, but when it comes down to it, not an entirely different practice than inviting people over to read your diary.
Then there was an age when the status quo was to think of blogging as a publishing platform, when the major media conglomerates picked up on the trend and incorporated it into their grasping-for-relevance news sites (the names: blogging software like TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress). The analogue here is closer to a newspaper, or a magazine. It’s faster, sure, and semi-interactive (readership can comment on the Big Writer’s ideas), but again, rather similar to an internet-free world.
Tumblr and its ilk (Posterous, Twitter) represent something new and totally digital. While the individual sites tend to look something like digital scrapbooks, or lists of links, the experience of having the conversation between personalities and posts roll through your browser is the closest any internet social network has come to unmapping the digital space from the meatspace. It’s like a unified, enhanced, semi-cyborg interaction (if you’ll selectively crib some from Haraway).
Metaphors
This is not to be taken lightly. Technology has a way of first attempting to imitate previous technologies in its quest for world domination. The first printing presses produced pages that were made to look as if they had been hand-printed in the style of the time. Early radio played Morse code; early cinema was filmed theater; early television was visual radio. As easy as it is to think as the personal computer, and especially the Internet, as some radical break from this trend – as if it were some completely original idea – it is fully steeped in old-media metaphors.
The personal computer as we know it is built as a metaphor for a real-life desktop – that’s why we have “wallpaper” and a “desktop” and “folders” with “files” in the first place. Alan Kay developed the first version of this metaphor for Xerox in the 1970s and it’s been the default user interface ever since. It persists today, even at the expense of usability. When you open the calculator application on your PC, there’s no reason you should be confined to a one-line fake LCD screen, or have to click imaginary buttons – the computer’s power allows for a lot more customization than that. Yet here we are, in 2010, using a program that emulates the antiquated, limiting, inefficient, and sort-of ugly technology aesthetic of the 1970s for some reason.
The same is true for the calendar application, and the clock, and the trash can (and so on, and so forth.)
One of the Internet’s earliest standard uses – email – is itself an extended metaphor for traditional mail. The things you “send” and “receive” are called “messages” and you “attach” things to it – even though none of those analogies really make sense when compared to what the technology is doing. People still begin their messages “Dear Max,” and end them “Love, Steve” even though the “header” of the message provides the to- and from- information.
The World Wide Web – the name of which itself imagines its space as some sort of physical “web” connecting computers across the earth – is another offender. We have web “pages” and web “sites.” Newspapers and magazines constantly break up their content online into “pages,” which you have to turn through. And the slideshows! Eastman Kodak Carousel, anyone?
The services built on top of it, even, haven’t surpassed this dogged metaphor-enabling. YouTube is on-demand television. Blogging is on-demand publishing. Facebook is the freshman face book. Skype is telephony. Everything has been done before! Not as well, but it has!
Except now we have microblogging, which might finally be breaking the wall of innovation. Twitter shamefully retains the character limit forced upon it by text messaging, but otherwise represents something that hasn’t been attempted before in media – a loosely historicized public conversation. Tumblr, and tumblelogging in general, take this to the next step and remove all restraints. You can add anything to the potentially infinite, never-ending, to-the-second, tumbling public discussion. Try doing that in print. (You can’t.)
What This Means for Writing
As such, it almost seems unfair to keep relating blogging to writing – as well as tumblelogging to blogging, and, transitively, tumblelogging to writing. The remove is too great. Tumblelogging represents more the spirit of collecting and sharing – of bringing disparate elements together and throwing them to the wind, where some might be picked up and edited and picked apart and commented on before being thrown back out. It is creating a textual/visual representation of taste. It is a version of representing the self that requires very little self-reflection – just lots and lots of action and plenty of quick choices.
This all is to skirt around something of a big question - does this make it more “authentic”?
To provide an equally skirting answer: does it matter? The discourse of authenticity has largely lost its way in the postmodern age, it seems. People call for a return to some age of sincerity and authenticity and niceness, but nobody seems to remember exactly how it worked. As we continue as a society to develop new technologies to express ourselves and our visions, we fall into patterns and stereotypes and ways of thinking that become hard to shake, and then begin to feel that we can’t “express ourselves freely” outside those constructed constraints.
Newspapers evolved over hundreds of years before coming to the point where they are today – with an entire manual dedicated to the “right way” to present a story. Readers come to expect those cliches and tropes and feel lost without them – so there’s little use in trying to break that mold. Even diaries – these private, untouchable spaces wherein people can (supposedly) write their “real” selves – have been co-opted by tropism. Generations of writers have been taught the “right” way to write a diary by reading, say, Anne Frank’s, or seeing someone doing it on television. Why else the ubiquity of “Dear diary”? That kind of pattern breeds ironic appreciation and snark and removal, and so the worry over authenticity begins.
Because it’s so new, and so seemingly removed from patterns and ingrained ways of thought that have dominated expression culture, tumblelogging at the very least has a brief chance at being the most original, least constraining way of presenting the self. It’s only a very short matter of time before the stereotypes and the “right” way to do it kick in, sure, but at this moment in time, it’s at least fresh.
It’s Already Losing It
To be sure, Tumblelogging has already spawned some tropes, traditions, and patterns; certain subgroups have realized the trend toward the general meme-ification of discourse on the site. Tumblr’s own community director, Christopher Price, even created a auto-Tumblr-post generator satirizing the way he has seen posts become more influenced by the langue of the internet at large. But maybe he’s just been around it too long and become cynical. Tumblr newcomer John Mayer (yes, that John Mayer) wrote recently that it’s “the future of social networking if your image of the future features intelligent discourse.” This is a developing story. Please stay tuned for whether Tumblr will succumb to typing and irony and tropes:
a) sooner
or
b) later.
What I mean to say is…
In a world saturated with too many ideas, Tumblr is a good way to spread them, at least for now. We’ve come to a place where to “look up” a person isn’t just to find their phone number in the yellow pages. We live in public. (When you look me up, you probably go to Google and then find my website, which is actually my Tumblr, but then also my Facebook page and Twitter profile and maybe even my Google profile, whatever that is, and my posts on Dowser, and maybe even my old blog from studying abroad in Switzerland and at this point you know too much and there’s no way all this information can’t be confusing!) Is the best way to get to know someone by their ideas, and lists of things they like, and pictures that they enjoyed, and songs they’ve heard? Maybe. That’s for you to decide (I have: yes.)
It is, though, the newest and best and least-reducible-to-metaphor way.
Get ready for it.
Works Consulted (LOL!)
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