barthel:

wellrespected:

barthel:

About how nothing on the Popular page is original content?  That it’s all other people’s quotes and links and pictures and songs?  And about what that says about, you know, all of this?  Yes?  OK, carry on.

I think partially it’s due to the screwy formula of Tumblarity, where quick, mindless content (e.g., photo of a scantily clad female with “artsy” lighting) can get a lot of quick, mindless “Likes” and rocket up in popularity. But moreso it’s the nature of Tumblr itself, where you really aren’t encouraged to create drafts of lengthy posts — it’s all about instant content. (This link gave me lulz. Link. Posted. Move on. Forget about it 10 seconds later.) It’s basically internet scrapbooking, and we’re all just collecting links, photos, songs, good reads and deep thoughts — cataloguing our time wasted on the internet.

On the one hand, I kinda like it, because it forces me not to fret over little details before I decide to post things. On the other hand, it’s made me an incredibly lazy micro-blogger.

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that it was bad necessarily, just that it seems to definitively position Tumblr as a sort of corkboard rather than a platform for writing.  This points to the larger problem of how you read the content people post online: is it like speech, or like writing?  Sometimes the difference is clear.  On messageboards, for example, there is no doubt that the model is one of speech and conversation, since you’re responding to people who have previously posted and are contributing to one long document that you don’t have sole authorship over.  Similarly, on blogs there seems to be a clear encoding of the content as writing, since even when you are responding to someone else it’s on its own page, probably with the author’s name on it, and people can have a conversation in the comments.  I tend to operate under the assumption that Tumblr is a blog, since every post has its own page, and its corkboardy functions are a part of its more social atmosphere, not its essential nature.  But I think I’m probably wrong.  Certainly most of the major Tumblrs are either rebloggers, picture posters, or purveyors of what is essentially conversation.

Why does it matter?  Well, I guess because whether you think of something as speech or writing (and here is where I venture into the “oh no Tristan is going to have something to say about this” waters) has an effect on what your expectations are for it, and consequently how you evaluate its value.  If Tumblr is conversation or self-display, then we look at either how well it serves that function for you as a person interested in talking and displaying, or how interesting it is in the aggregate, in watching people talk to each other and negotiate their tastes.  But if it’s writing, then we would expect more original content, more care in composition, and more authorial control, while caring less about how social it is or how useful for the average user.  I like that Tumblr encourages me to post a lot, but I don’t like that I’ve more or less abandoned my main blog, and I have to admit that most of the time when something long comes up in my dashboard, unless it’s from one of the people I care about, I’m probably going to skip it.  It’s fine either way, I suppose, and maybe the current trend toward microblogging/lifeblogging/etc. is just a swing of the pendulum away from the content-heavy style of earlier years.  And, again, we basically had this conversation about MP3blogs a good few years ago!  But it’s interesting, anyway.

ETA: All of which, of course, could be tied to my complaint about The Internet as a “you are expecting an orange to taste like an apple” argument.  But I thought I was buying an apple!

Mainly just typing to agree.

At some point in the last few months, I realized that “content” doesn’t feel like le mot juste anymore, as far as labeling the stuff we contribute to the internet. Content implies a filling up. Something that will be preserved, indexed, catalogued. At some point in the last few years, what used to be content became just words thrown down the black hole of the internet. Whether it’s tumblr, or Facebook, or Twitter, or even Wordpress.com with it’s ridiculous global tagging system, nothing is saved. Archives are at best an afterthought. Very little is considered to be of value the next day, the next week. We throw words down the whole, a few people glance at them, maybe even a lot of people, but the words keep falling, and maybe you “like” them somehow, but then they are gone and there are new words falling.

But the thing is, I’ve had complaints or gripes about this issue—or topics related to the quality of writing on the internet in general—going back to at least 2001. Ask Josh, as he is usually the person I dump them on.* And I don’t feel that the situation has gotten appreciably worse in the last 8 years, so maybe it’s just How It Is.

*Which is unfair, because if someone wants an example of a person on the internet, right now, typing in words and succeeding at capturing people’s attention, it’s him. The fact that the most popular stuff on tumblr, favrd (most days), Digg, whatever is not him doesn’t mean everything sucks, that’s just how the internet has always been. Lots of noise, but a couple of nice signals here and there, if you can tune them in right. That’s what I try to focus on. I lose focus a lot. I get so angry and disappointed sometimes. But I try. I will always have higher hopes for the internet, but it’s still better than anything else. Despite how often I feel totally at odds with the internet, it still has brought more good things into my life than bad.

• Reblogged from Mike Barthel's Tumblr