tumblr IRL: a social history

you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!

The photo you’d find underneath a dictionary entry for ‘Tumblr user’.

I made my Tumblr account in 2012 during a lunch break on a school field trip when I was fourteen years old. The URL I chose was lets-hang-out-forever, which I changed about three days later to awkgirlalex, and then changed again to fluor3sc3nt-adol3sc3nt (obviously the actual song name was taken, so I had to sub the e’s for threes). At seventeen, perhaps my period of peak angst, I settled on haze-dolores, a snippet from a line of poetry that Humbert Humbert writes about Dolores Haze in Lolita, and that alter ego finally stuck. I changed my blog name probably four times a year like a snake shedding its skin or a tech guy switching his iPhone for the newer, shinier model. It was a textual moniker for my identity, a way to signify to potential followers or internet friends, as we called them back then, what I was all about. At the time, Tumblr was a utopian, anonymous space for self-discovery, more private than other social media sites like (the artist formerly known as) Twitter or Instagram. We even had our own secret phrases; does “I like your shoelaces” mean anything to you?

I debated whether it was worth it to write a few explanatory paragraphs about Tumblr and its usage; after all, anyone can google it and get a pretty good summary of its (relatively) brief heyday. But I don’t want the uninitiated to feel left out, so here’s a layman’s guide. Tumblr was founded in 2007 by David Karp, when he was just 21 years old. Activity peaked between 2012 and 2016, with its user base declining drastically from 100 million in early 2014 to 30 million in 2018, according to Statista. This downward trajectory is often attributed to a buyout from Yahoo in 2013, which led to another buyout from Verizon in 2017, who acquired both companies by default. In 2018, now under new ownership, Tumblr banned all ‘pornographic’ content, including images of ‘female nipples’. If you’ve ever glimpsed at Tumblr, you know that Pornographic Content makes up no small part of its ecosystem, and thus many longtime Tumblrinas set sail for other seas.

There were generally considered to be two ‘sides’ of Tumblr: fandom blogs and aesthetic blogs. I suspect the current fixation with using the term ‘aesthetic’ as an adjective i.e. “That’s so aesthetic!” can be partially attributed to Tumblr, though I’d just as soon shift the lion’s share of the blame onto TikTok. Popular fandoms included all the stereotypically nerdy media franchises: Harry Potter, comic books, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Whedon-verse, etc. Broadway also had a domineering presence, with Les misérables, Hamilton, and Heathers: The Musical gaining a lot of traction between 2012 and 2015. But the reigning fandom of Tumblr was Superwholock, a portmanteau of two BBC shows (Sherlock and Doctor Who) and one CW show (Supernatural) that featured smarmy dreamboy (?) protagonists — AKA Tumblr Sexymen — who could be lumped together in endless gay pairings. Aesthetic Tumblr, on the other hand, took inspiration from mood-boarding or vision-boarding, with a focus on photography, film stills, outfit pictures, Perks of Being a Wallflower quotes, and lyrics on visually pleasing backgrounds. Some of these aesthetics included Soft Grunge, Coquette/Nymphet, and Quality Blogs (high-res pictures of EOS chapsticks or Starbucks drinks taken with DSLR cameras). This roadmap is not exhaustive — you could argue that ‘band Tumblr’ was also a distinct community — but it’s a start. As you can imagine, there was plenty of infighting but also plenty of crossover.

Tumblr is usually lumped into the umbrella term of ‘social media site’, but I don’t think that’s exactly accurate. While collaboration was a huge part of its appeal, it wasn’t the same as liking a Facebook post or tweeting. Tumblr offered users the option to create text, audio, video, or image posts that could be shared (or reblogged) by other users. These posts could be categorized via tags (hashtag Sherlock, hashtag SoftGrunge), and you could search these tags for similar content. Your blog was home to all of the posts you created or shared, and Tumblr offered full HTML customization (called Themes), similar to Myspace or other early profile-hosting sites. If you wanted any sort of person-to-person interactions, you could use the inbox feature, sending a message, anonymous or otherwise, directly to the blog you wished to speak to. Tumblr didn’t introduce direct messages until 2015, and so sending anonymous Asks (as they were called) was a fun way to cause chaos and pretend to spill your guts. A common Tumblr trend was to reblog a set of questions and ask people to send you numbers to answer via your inbox. My friends and I would intentionally send each other the sauciest prompts — Who did you last kiss? What’s your biggest turn-on? Are you a virgin? — just to stir the pot.

Tumblr was special because it was a digital location, a bedroom of your own that you could design using a rudimentary knowledge of HTML. While I sometimes scrolled the Tumblr app on my iTouch or Android until I hit the dreaded Post Limit, I spent most of my time endlessly reblogging on the family desktop, on my mother’s work laptop when she left it unattended, and then on my giant, clunky Acer, even after I broke the screen. It was a destination, unlike Twitter or Instagram which demanded to be carried around in your pocket because their usefulness relied, at least initially, on their immediacy. This was reflected in the language used on Tumblr to differentiate between the blogosphere and the real world: IRL, or in real life. Maybe we didn’t know it at the time, but my fellow Tumblr girls and I were creating a Mark Fisher-esque distinction between our literal and digital realities. The identities that we fashioned to navigate through cyberspace did not need to be hampered by our real-life problems. This is what it means to be a ghost in the shell — we outsourced our inner selves, the ones that felt the most true, onto the web, leaving the burden of our physical bodies safely in the computer chair.

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A screenshot of my blog title and bio ~2016

I learned so many things on that website. I was first exposed to both international art cinema and feminist film theory on Tumblr, and as imperfect as that exposure was it also provided me with a useful alternative to the very masculine model of cinephilia that was the only thing available to me in my hometown. My earliest encounters with social justice happened there, and while now it is chic to laugh about the various hairsplitting sexualities (demisexual, greysexual, etc) I think it was better, and not worse, that Tumblr provided a relatively safe playground for marginalized teens to explore their relationship to gender and sexuality. Many of these young people grew up in towns where publicly claiming their identities could lead to harassment or even physical violence. Of course, this is a double-edged sword. When speaking to other former Tumblrinas I heard many complaints about adult users who groomed their teenage audience via the internet. This was especially prevalent in online fandom spaces, which tended to be both more gender diverse and also anecdotally had a larger age range than other areas of Tumblr.

And sure, there was a dark side — including certain corners of the aforementioned Aesthetic Tumblr, where it was easy for an underage girl who liked vintage fashion to be coerced down a pipeline that led to posting risqué, sexually transgressive images in the name of liberation. It was certainly a sick kind of heaven for adult men looking for impressionable young women dying to be deemed wise beyond their years. I’ll confess that for a time in my mid-to-late teens I ran a coquette blog (surprise, surprise). During that period of my life I used Lolita and its related visual iconography to mediate my own feelings about the mundane horrors of teenage girlhood. I felt very worldly and soiled, and I found solace in sharing triggering images of destroyed beauty: dead rabbits, bruised knees, bloody noses. I flirted with edgy coquette fatalism and bread-crumbed my high school friends with concerning text posts. They would send me Tumblr Asks expressing support, and I would refuse to acknowledge it in class the next day. My blog title (different from your URL, for those uninformed) was Such a disgusting girl, and I really believed that to be an accurate descriptor of myself. I never fell too deep into the edgelord-ism, never wound up on the serial killer fandom side of Tumblr or in reactionary group chats, but I can easily see how some girls like me did.

But these more sinister elements of Tumblr bred one of its best and most beautiful qualities: it felt like a secret. I stumbled upon things I was not supposed to see. I would find a beautiful image and visit the account that posted it, only to discover that it was a gore account or pornography account and quickly close out. I fell through wormholes and ended up in scary places, like a digital Alice in her digital wonderland. Many young women used the website as a diary, vomiting their most self-loathing thoughts onto ‘vent blogs’ that included mentions of childhood sexual trauma, eating disorders, or relationship abuse. These vent blogs became avatars for girls who needed a place to store their unprocessed memories; there is something more cathartic about sending a mental spiral into the internet ether rather than shutting it away in a journal. When writers speak of ‘liminal spaces’ I think about how sometimes those places aren’t places as we understand them: they’re websites. Now, thanks to the brutal efficiency of the Algorithm (something I can’t even pretend to understand), it is so rare to see anything that wasn’t placed on a platter for you. Buy this shirt, try this recipe, look at this girl who looks exactly like you but three crucial pounds lighter — the mystery is gone, the sense of discovery totally lost.

I don’t mean to eulogize Tumblr as if it’s a dead website, because it’s not. There are still plenty of active users, but it’s less culturally relevant than it once was because it has become less user-friendly. Its owners have attempted to make Tumblr profitable many times and, in typical Tumblr fashion, this has not only proved impossible but has also alienated long-time account holders. The newly introduced features — Tumblr live, purchasable post interactions — have made it difficult for returning users to find their way home. Every couple of months I log in to see what’s going on and I feel like I’ve stumbled into a party after everyone has gone, with paper plates of cake and sticky red solo cups still left out on plastic card tables. When Fisher writes about hauntology I think of peak Tumblr in this way — a repository for our adolescent interests, an abandoned museum of internet micro trends.

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from the first month of my Tumblr account

While writing this piece, I spoke to many former Tumblrinas as part of my research; or maybe I just wanted to reminisce. One thing that repeatedly arose during these interviews was the desire to transcend the every day, to feel like part of an in-group during a period of life that can be very alienating. It was communal by nature, encouraging bloggers to add to each other’s posts both in the form of notes (or comments) and by reblogging with added text or images. Bloggers expressed in total earnest a wish to attend Tumblr university, even formulating a schedule and school uniform. Audrey referred to her participation in an exquisite corpse-style Hannibal fanfiction as one of her favorite memories on the site, and Rachael alluded fondly to a 100,000-word fanfiction she wrote with other Tumblr users. I myself co-wrote a cross-fandom Harry Potter fanfiction with a neighborhood friend, one of the only other Tumblrinas I knew at fourteen; in actuality, we were basically roleplaying over text message, but at the end of this experiment we probably had at least a few chapters of a book on our hands.

Tumblr’s rise feels inextricably (or at least anecdotally) linked to the decline of the existence of third places, a topic that has been covered by other more anthropologically knowledgeable writers than me. Even early forms of social networking involved some degree of interaction with Real Life — you connect with friends after school on AIM or wait to see if your crush ranks you in his Top 8 on Myspace. But as the digital world became more and more divorced from its corporeal counterpart, social networks evolved to fill a growing, perhaps diametrically opposed, need for both connection and escape. If social media is the new town square, then Tumblr was the weird back alley. You could be anyone on Tumblr. You could display all of your most abject interests and proclivities and someone, somewhere, would identify with you. It makes sense to me that Tumblr became associated almost immediately with young women — ‘Tumblr girl’ or ‘Tumblrina’ are now used sometimes endearingly and sometimes pejoratively to describe a specific type of internet user between the years of 2012-2016. Women’s interests are so often belittled that it’s not a stretch to believe many teenage girls felt more comfortable sharing them on a fairly anonymous blogging site than with their actual peers.

In every single one of the interviews I conducted, ‘making friends’ was a major motivating factor as to why the interviewee a) created a Tumblr account and b) developed a consistent relationship with using the website. Aileen started a blog to keep up with friends from a Korean multiplayer online roleplaying game. Hayley attended The 1975 concerts with girls she met exclusively through the online fandom, and she keeps in touch with them via more traditional social media even now. “Most of the women who had the biggest impact on me were older than me, and I remember casting these girls — then in their early 20s — as obsessive role models of alternative and exciting lifestyles in a likely embarrassing, very sappy, and aspirational way,” Audrey says. “Tumblr was really the first place I met people who weren’t straight or even just were able to talk about desire, identity, and personhood in an environment somewhat (but not always) isolated from misogyny, bigotry, and authority.”

I don’t think these occurrences are isolated. Tumblr encouraged its users to view it as more than just another blogging site or social media network; David Karp actually maintained an active online presence and occasionally answered questions from users. Karp had a fandom of his own in the way that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey did not. While these men might have garnered admiration from nascent tech bros, Karp received almost the same amount of admiration afforded to actors popular with Tumblr’s user base, like BBC baddies Benedict Cumberbatch and David Tennant. Teenage girls referred to him as “Daddy Karp”, and in the early days it was common to see posts extolling Karp’s relative attractiveness in comparison to other social media founders. He had the Bieber haircut, he was thin, he was nonthreatening. In other words, Tumblr was built to feel like a safer place than other corners of the internet, even if this safety was an illusion.

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I’m bitches……

During my senior year of high school I began using my blog to catalog the actual events of my life in what I thought were vague terms. I was undergoing immense strife because, for once, I had a secret that I really needed to keep. No, I didn’t commit any crime, but I felt like a fugitive. I was alone in this secrecy, crushed by the weight of it, and so I took to the only outlet I thought was truly mine: my blog. I denoted all of my text posts with the tags ‘personal’ and an acronym I invented which I believed to be stealthy and sly. As my personal life continued to grow more and more unbearable, blogging became a compulsory acknowledgement of my own suffering, something I did at the end of the day to expunge myself of the grime. I tagged everything with this acronym — all the angsty photos and Jeff Buckley lyrics and film stills. I am intentionally being cryptic about the nature of this emotional rupture even now, something I maybe should have taken more care to do back then. After several months of semi-publicly broadcasting my downward spiral, a couple of fellow students began messaging me to ask what the acronym meant. I had forgotten how many of my classmates could see what I was doing; it was an artsy high school, we all worshipped at the altar of self-persecution. I panicked and lied, confessing to something just lurid enough to throw them off the scent.

After this scare my relationship to Tumblr changed slightly, though I continued to blog regularly until 2018, when many of my friends left the site as a result of the ownership change. I have tried slowly to migrate back to it. I think, at the very least, that it has the potential to be a great tool for artists and writers. Not only did it expose me to many directors, photographers, authors, and musicians that I might otherwise never have discovered, but it became an archive of inspiration for my (as yet) unrealized books and screenplays. The problem with Tumblr is that I am deeply emotionally attached to it, and I cannot be normal about that attachment. It reminds me of a very specific time in my life that I can’t get back. And thank God I can’t! I was miserable, confused, and destructive. I had no sense of self-preservation and clung to harmful habits. I was often a bad friend and a bad daughter. When I log on now, as a (fairly well-adjusted) newly 27-year-old, I feel like a “tall child,” a term Mitski coined in her song “First Love/Late Spring.”

But Tumblr was beautiful because we were probably all bad friends and bad daughters. I am not in the business of romanticizing the joint proclivity toward self-harm or disordered eating or unhealthy relationships, but I think there were more dangerous places to be than Tumblr dot com. “Tumblr brought me community at a time when I desperately needed it,” Rachael said. “I made so many friends through the fandoms I was a part of — friendships I deeply regret not maintaining!” When I voiced my most vulnerable thoughts I was met with sympathy and understanding, messages from total strangers, other teenage girls who insisted that there was nothing wrong with me, that the world was better because I was in it. We repeated these same trite reassurances to each other over and over again, and I hope all of us are still here, somewhere in the network, even if we are no longer in contact. What’s lost in discussions of Tumblr as ‘cringe’ or overly earnest is that for a lot of its users, it was the only place where we didn’t have to hide important facets of our personalities or identities. I have friends who came out on Tumblr long before they came out In Real Life. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that it could be life-saving.

The truth is that the Internet is no longer a place you go, but an implant that you carry even when you are asleep. I feel so lucky to have grown up on the precipice of this switch; in the slim boundary between early social media and the current near-singularity, Tumblr thrived. I’m wary of the uptick in digital nostalgia — what do you mean you miss “2018” — but I’m equally wary of the classic rebuttal, “Of course life was better in 2013, you were just a kid.” Life wasn’t better then, it was demonstrably worse. What a silly thing to say, that we are all simply nostalgic for the time in which we were teenagers. You couldn’t pay me to be a sixteen-year-old girl again. When we talk about missing Tumblr, what we really miss is having a place on the internet that’s totally un-monetizable. It resists all attempts at profit. It was the one place on the internet where the only real bad (and good) influences were each other, the last bastion of online earnestness. Blogging during peak Tumblr was like smoking your first cigarette with that slightly older girl from your high school who wore creepers and Black Flag t-shirts: not a real rebellion, but it sure felt like it was. So I wear my Tumblrina badge proudly, when someone comments on my shoelaces I say, “Thanks, I stole them from the president.” Become ungovernable.