guess you misunderstood
For the most part I do genuinely like Tumblr. I enjoy liking posts and reblogging things. I appreciate the people who follow me and those individuals that I follow. However, it's bothered me for a very long time that it is simply not a site in which you can actually carry on a conversation with another person or even a group of people the way other social networking sites do. Last night was probably one of the more memorable ones in regard to that fact.
This post and the subsequent fallout that led to those 9869 notes is a good case, though hardly the only example of how difficult it is to actually have an intellectual exchange with someone on Tumblr. Last night this individual posted what she felt was a seemingly innocuous joke while waiting for election results to roll in. Almost immediately, other users, some via the comfort of anonymity, filled her inbox with comments about how offensive the post was and how dare she trivialize something so important as the rights of real gays by compelling others to think about the fate of their fictional gay couples' should Romney be elected president. Others reblogged the post with similar sentiments. I get that having that many people who don't know you come out and say 'Hi. I don't find what you had to say funny and in fact it is quite harmful to the cause' to 'Fuck you how dare you make this very real issue about your fictional dudebro romances' can be overwhelming and as such I understand the defensiveness the OP had.
In an ideal setting, the person, who then went on to claim that she was in fact a straight ally and in her own words had done more for equal rights than some gays had, would have simply immediately apologized, admitted that it was in fact quite offensive, deleted said post, and then perhaps moved on. Instead, what happened was the person proceeded to tell others that they should not be so easily offended, some of those persons being the very gays that OP professed to be defending. This went on for quite some time with said person resorting to the age old standard of 'you don't know me how dare you judge me' and 'of course I care about the real gays and their real issues that was not my intent to trivialize your struggle'. Here's where Tumblr fails as a social site. It's very easy to reblog something fandom related and vomit feels and meta in the tags. It's incredibly difficult to express to a person that a joke can be incredibly offensive even if it isn't overtly so. In fact, it's those subtle things that are more harmful really than the overt ones because they normalize offensive speech.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I found of all the things I encountered last night with the entire thing was a person who defended OP's right to open her mouth and make an ass of herself and in the same breath also believed OP to be ignorant of how offensive she was being. When I pointed out to that person that OP was in fact aware that it had offended people and was trying to minimize the whole matter by claiming it was merely a joke and she was in fact an ally, it was tossed back at me that there were more important things to worry over than one ignorant kid saying something stupid on Tumblr. That line of thinking-It's okay for someone to say something offensive without consequence. It's the internet!-is something I find troubling. That's absurd. We live in a world where the things we say online are available for everyone from our mothers to our future employers to see. If you don't want your statements judged by the public, simply don't make them publicly available.
I just recently finished reading The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. In one of the chapters Mr. Friedman explains that a number of events that have restructured our world from a top down sort of environment to a horizontal playing field where the average person with blog is just as much capable as a respected traditional newspaper at presenting information for public consumption. So, isn't it important then, that the information that we present is accurate and as free from hatefulness as possible? Don't we, have a duty to point out that someone is being offensive, no matter how seemingly trivial it might be? One ignorant kid on Tumblr is going to eventually grow up to be one ignorant adult who lives on your street, who works with you or for you, or will be the one making policies that shape your world. Even those who mean well can and do say terrible things. Should we just let that slide because they're on our side? I certainly hope not.
In the most meandering way possible, what I'm trying to say is that it bothers me that Tumblr isn't a place where I can actually have an intellectual discourse with a group of people and come away feeling good about something even if I was proved wrong. It's not a place where I feel like the user base can connect and grow and that saddens me because it's painfully clear that Tumblr isn't going away any time soon. I guess what I'm getting at is that I want Tumblr to be for me what LJ has been, but no matter how much I might want that to be the case, without a good means to have a conversation with other users, Tumblr really will only ever be that place I go to where I reblog cute cat photos and pretty food that I'd like to be eating.
This post and the subsequent fallout that led to those 9869 notes is a good case, though hardly the only example of how difficult it is to actually have an intellectual exchange with someone on Tumblr. Last night this individual posted what she felt was a seemingly innocuous joke while waiting for election results to roll in. Almost immediately, other users, some via the comfort of anonymity, filled her inbox with comments about how offensive the post was and how dare she trivialize something so important as the rights of real gays by compelling others to think about the fate of their fictional gay couples' should Romney be elected president. Others reblogged the post with similar sentiments. I get that having that many people who don't know you come out and say 'Hi. I don't find what you had to say funny and in fact it is quite harmful to the cause' to 'Fuck you how dare you make this very real issue about your fictional dudebro romances' can be overwhelming and as such I understand the defensiveness the OP had.
In an ideal setting, the person, who then went on to claim that she was in fact a straight ally and in her own words had done more for equal rights than some gays had, would have simply immediately apologized, admitted that it was in fact quite offensive, deleted said post, and then perhaps moved on. Instead, what happened was the person proceeded to tell others that they should not be so easily offended, some of those persons being the very gays that OP professed to be defending. This went on for quite some time with said person resorting to the age old standard of 'you don't know me how dare you judge me' and 'of course I care about the real gays and their real issues that was not my intent to trivialize your struggle'. Here's where Tumblr fails as a social site. It's very easy to reblog something fandom related and vomit feels and meta in the tags. It's incredibly difficult to express to a person that a joke can be incredibly offensive even if it isn't overtly so. In fact, it's those subtle things that are more harmful really than the overt ones because they normalize offensive speech.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I found of all the things I encountered last night with the entire thing was a person who defended OP's right to open her mouth and make an ass of herself and in the same breath also believed OP to be ignorant of how offensive she was being. When I pointed out to that person that OP was in fact aware that it had offended people and was trying to minimize the whole matter by claiming it was merely a joke and she was in fact an ally, it was tossed back at me that there were more important things to worry over than one ignorant kid saying something stupid on Tumblr. That line of thinking-It's okay for someone to say something offensive without consequence. It's the internet!-is something I find troubling. That's absurd. We live in a world where the things we say online are available for everyone from our mothers to our future employers to see. If you don't want your statements judged by the public, simply don't make them publicly available.
I just recently finished reading The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. In one of the chapters Mr. Friedman explains that a number of events that have restructured our world from a top down sort of environment to a horizontal playing field where the average person with blog is just as much capable as a respected traditional newspaper at presenting information for public consumption. So, isn't it important then, that the information that we present is accurate and as free from hatefulness as possible? Don't we, have a duty to point out that someone is being offensive, no matter how seemingly trivial it might be? One ignorant kid on Tumblr is going to eventually grow up to be one ignorant adult who lives on your street, who works with you or for you, or will be the one making policies that shape your world. Even those who mean well can and do say terrible things. Should we just let that slide because they're on our side? I certainly hope not.
In the most meandering way possible, what I'm trying to say is that it bothers me that Tumblr isn't a place where I can actually have an intellectual discourse with a group of people and come away feeling good about something even if I was proved wrong. It's not a place where I feel like the user base can connect and grow and that saddens me because it's painfully clear that Tumblr isn't going away any time soon. I guess what I'm getting at is that I want Tumblr to be for me what LJ has been, but no matter how much I might want that to be the case, without a good means to have a conversation with other users, Tumblr really will only ever be that place I go to where I reblog cute cat photos and pretty food that I'd like to be eating.