Tumblr

We are visual beings.  We live in a visual world. Our perceptions of the world, the information we absorb and the signals we send, are overwhelmingly visual in nature. We think and dream in pictures and symbolic images.  We replay and re-create life visually in our heads.  Even when we read, we transform the words into mental pictures. But what happens to traditional blogging? As a journalist student, I find it a struggle. Lately, I’ve been having writer’s block and I’ve been shamelessly turning to Tumblr to seek for inspiration to write. I find myself going back to Tumblr every single day just to seek some sort of comfort to make up for the loss words that my mind can’t seem to apprehend.

In the past few years, I feel that social networking has started to overshadow traditional blogging. With the emergence of Tumblr, WordPress, Pinterest, Blogger, Livejournal and other websites have provided platforms for writers to express their thoughts (even when their moleskin is full), a place for advertising, a place to provide a running narrative of our incessant selfies, a place where we can share our ideas with the world, sometimes building a movement, connect with like-minded individuals etc…  Tumblr has created such a phenomenon effect on us in the bloggersphere and has successfully managed to “seize my play on words and expression” in a way I feel like I can conform to but… that’s just pure laziness if you’re a journalist.

Tumblr – the easier way to blog . But one thing for sure, writing a blog post to me takes time, energy, inspiration and grammar skills. The cycle of sharing of ideas and thoughts, has in many forms, outgrown blogging, or evolved beyond the concept of blogging.

Pictures like these are seen aplenty on the Tumblr platform, where users get to utilized such formats like these to distill their favourite moments in life, whether it is a tv show or an image of a night sky, narration is then added in the form of overlying text. Needless to say photos are of great practical and emotional value: as a record of our daily events, an art of freezing a moment in time, a memory of the past. They are fragmented, they alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at other than just typing them out in descriptive words. An image posted up online is something that is fragmented, rather than simplified, collective rather than it being singular, it could mean anything. Well, in tumblr, the amount of images put up online, constitutes to a “grammer of scene”, no need for words, just plain reblogging of music/videos/ images with overlaying text over. But, then again what happens to the essence of journalism?

“Since the advent of the Internet – more recently compounded by blogging – everyone can be a published voice. Any cowardly, anonymous anger- monger can have an audience of thousands. That doesn’t make them a journalist any more than my throwing an onion and a few carrots into a pot of boiling water makes me Julia Child.”
-Lynda Resnick

What I feel is that Tumblr provides a good platform for conversations, it’s a time saver for people, it streamlines more information on a certain topic.  It’s much more participatory, whereas a traditional blogpost written is mostly designed to be consumed. (Even though there’s a comment tab) Stories are somehow built organically in Tumblr thanks to the rebloggers. What do you think?

This caught my attention whilst reading Bolter’s definition of Soft and Hard structures of writing. Tumblr is a great example of what Bolter describes as “Soft structures”.