If you’re web-literate and young, I’m sure you will have
stumbled at least once on something on Tumblr, a mish-mash of photos, gifs and
philosophical quotes taken out of context. If you don’t have an account on this
website, you have only seen a small fraction of this network of fanbases and
their accompanying hyper-idolatry and obsession. For take a leap into this
small but powerful corner of the internet.
When you arrive on your ‘dashboard’, the equivalent to a
Facebook or Twitter feed, if you are following blogs, most people will say
photos of random places and things, like phone boxes, beautiful horizons from
beaches, or people’s dogs. Most people post GIFs – a cross between photos and
video, which loop continuously. The most common GIFs are often ripped from
popular YouTube hits, usually sassy black women, giving looks of disapproval.
It’s this that seems to have cemented the reputation of Tumblr of being
populated by hipsters, which makes it, automatically, completely pointless and people unfamiliar to its charms rate it on par with MySpace as being a fad.
Its charms? The function that makes it popular among (not-so) niche fangroups is tagging, so when searching for material on the site, the results correspond to the tags given by the publisher to the photo/rant/fangirl seizure. Arguably the most popular fanbases among teenage girls, the most avid users of Tumblr, are Justin Bieber and One Direction (obviously), and it shows, take One Direction as an example. Type in ‘one direction’, ‘1 direction’, one of the members of said band, or just ‘1d’, and you are bombarded with pictures, gifs, videos, quotes, rants, anything that can be posted on the internet, about One Direction. The same goes with anyone who can be put under the umbrella of ‘celebrity’.
And to me, this scares me. I can imagine that if you’re new
to ‘show-business’ (a term becoming quickly old-fashioned), these deluges of
hyper-interest, which can be taken so far as to be cyberstalking is alerting.
The fact that teenage girls argue not just about who is the best in One
Direction but about which is the best ‘ship’ or (i.e. the prediction that two
of the band members are secretly in a relationship with each other) and how
they can be proved/disproved on the basis of supposed intimacy. There are
people that have managed to make fun of this. Charlieissocoollike made a video
about Tumblr a while back (click here) and did mock his fans for their activities on
Tumblr, but even he is slightly discomforted by things such as the fanfiction
(I’ll leave that until another time). Think about it – who would be comforted
by such things as childhood photos being posted, not by you, on such things as
Tumblr, to see repeatedly?
This is not a criticism of the internet, or teenage girls,
known for posting attractive men on walls and listening to the byproduct of
studio sound equipment. This happened fifty years ago, and perhaps this is the
modern equivalent of having rooms dedicated to the latest heartthrob.
Nevertheless, the level to which the obsession is reaching is disconcerting,
even from just an observer. And so the earth turns round.
Alexander
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