Tumblr as an Artifact

 Sarah Karsten
Dr. Wendy
HU2642
24 September 2012
Tumblr: An Artifact of Digital Media
    When we look at artifacts of digital media in our age, it’s hard to determine what honestly is and isn’t pushing the boundaries of various definitions of media.  There are so many different definitions of what digital media could be, so how does one decipher the deciding factors?  Regardless of your definition, Tumblr has truly changed the way we blog and share media.  Although it may not be an educational resource, the way it allows us to share media & the forms of media it allows, the community it has created, and its purpose make Tumblr a digital artifact.
    First, a little bit of history on this amazing site: Tumblr was founded in February 2007 by David Karp.  Within two weeks of the site launch there were 75,000 registered users, although now 10 times that many people are joining every month (Ingram).  If that isn’t impressive enough, Karp started the company at the age of 19 with just himself and one other programmer.  The company has since grown to 103 employees, 74.9 million blogs, and 32.3 billion posts. (Tumblr).
    “From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked.  The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation....It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary.” (Sullivan).  In this phrase Sullivan described the amazing qualities that blogging has to offer.  Though he might not specifically refer to Tumblr itself, these are all qualities that tumblr has to offer.  Not only does Tumblr offer text posts, but it allows pictures to be posted from a URL or uploaded, it has special formats for quotes and conversations, videos that are uploaded, recorded on the spot, or from URL, a simple link, and audio posts in many formats.  The constant additions of capabilities such as being able to link up with Spotify and Soundcloud to share music and other sounds help keep it up to date with the current times.
    Sharing all these things is incredibly simple.  Each post by a blogger other than yourself has the number of notes, or the number of times a post has been liked or reblogged, followed by a button that allows you to reblog the post, and a heart which allows you to ‘like’ the post.  As a user, you can also follow other blogs whose media will show up on your dashboard, which is similar to Facebook’s “newsfeed”.  You can attach tags to each post to make it easier for other people to find your posts, or find posts associated with a certain subject or word.  A shortcut of pressing the “alt” key means you can reblog things without even editing or tagging the post.  “Mass media and data processing are complementary technologies; they appear together and develop side by side, making modern mass society possible.” (Manovich, 23).  What Manovich means by this is that media and data go hand in hand.  While media may appear to be more for our enjoyment, as tumblr seems to be, data and important information are also processed through the same mediums.
    Community doesn’t even begin to describe what the users of Tumblr seem to form.  The compassion that I’ve witnessed as a part of this piece of digital media is absolutely fascinating.  I learned of Tumblr from a high school friend who said she had met several friends on the site.  Honestly, having been a user of the site for two years I can see why that is so easy to do.  The variety of the topics of blogs really creates a unique experience that anyone can find their niche in.  Some people have blogs that follow their favorite television shows that include quotes, pictures, and clips.  Other people have political Tumblrs, personal Tumblrs, DIY Tumblrs, and even celebrities have their own personal Tumblrs filled with their favorite media of themselves.  There are also tools that make it easy to interact with other users.  You have the option to turn on submissions for your Tumblr, and an ask box where people can send questions or messages.  Manovich talks about what makes something truly interactive, and goes into many facets of psychology to explain his ideas.  Essentially, Tumblr fits the title of new media because “...subjects have to be standardized, and the means by which they are standardized need to be standardized as well...private mental processes, and their equation with external visual forms that can easily be manipulated, mass produced, and standardized on their own. “ (Manovich, 60).  Tumblr makes posts so easy to manipulate, and often there are posts that have over 50,000 notes on them.  Things really are standardized in their own way due to what people tend to reblog or post in the first place.  This brings me back to my original idea of the community of Tumblr, because each community has their own standards, and manipulates the media they post in different ways.
    There is clearly only one argument about the purpose of Tumblr.  A new word in blogging at the time of Tumblr’s inception was “tumblelog” which was a short form blog post.  Karp clearly didn’t want to wait for someone else to create a platform specifically for these posts, so he developed one himself (Barnes).  As Tumblr grew features were added and modified to increase the experience.  I can only relate this to Baudrillard, in the sense that while Tumblr exists, it also doesn’t exist at the same time.  It is not something that we can physically hold, yet it is a thought process and pattern of digital media that we experience.  It is real, because the community makes it real (Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulations).  I believe Tumblr must have been created as a new blog site.  However, it has clearly evolved into a social networking paradise that allows us to post things in a world that does not require us to interact face to face.
    Thus Tumblr is an artifact of digital media due to it’s almost infinite possibilities, and unique communication tools.  By allowing us to post whatever we see, feel, think, or hear, Tumblr has created a social networking community unlike anything else.  The simple tools makes it a user friendly tool, giving it a broad audience of all sorts of different people from different walks of life, and those users give the site purpose.  So what then are the deciding factors in Tumblr being a digital media artifact?  The interactive qualities make it a great contender, yet to me it is still the vast variety of subject matter that is ever changing with our current times, and what keeps us relevant.