My early ventures into the social realms of the internet were filled with hopes of wish fulfillment; dreams of what I previously thought impossible.
There’s me, pre-pubescent, eager to connect with others like myself, shitposting on popular website “neopets”, breaking the rules and identifying myself above the virtual age limit so that I could communicate with peers across the world. It was terrible … It was thrilling. It was transformative.
Websites like Tumblr specifically built on this blueprint, birthing a whole new generational sensibility which didn’t privilege specific formats, like Instagram did with images or text focused outlets like Wordpress and Twitter – it was as non-hierarchical as a social media platform could possibly be. Hierarchies of taste, too, were disrupted as a result of the formatting and the accompanying culture.
A multi-disciplinary, middlebrow approach to consumption began to define a digital generation; in your “Tumblr feed” you could see a gif from a tv show alongside a photograph of a neoclassical painting without comment, sandwiched in between an audio clip of album deep cut, then perhaps a selfie the blogger found sexy. After a time, you began to accept the random nature of it all.
I learned in those tender years of internet use that there was a great freedom in being able to adopt a username and online persona, to be free from the inevitable prison of my physical self and the circumstances that followed. With Tumblr I found others who shared my experiences, discovered ways to speak about the world so that I could understand it more fully, ways with which to connect with others and develop my tastes, my political orientation, the things I thought important.
And more opportunities to shitpost.
Yet social media feels markedly different now in a way that sometimes feels hard to pinpoint. Investors and brands have long since discovered that “online” is the main way people communicate, it is no longer a haven for specialists. In a world primed for influencers, it’s become a place catered to capital, people who are already protected by the mainstream.
If you have the money or model face to push your posts to the top of the algorithm, you’re in luck. I’m constantly logging onto websites in order to connect with friends and family only to have the messages of snake oil merchants screaming at me about how I need to improve myself. It’s a great time to be online if you’re a fan of pyramid schemes.
On websites like Tumblr, there was a differing type of publicness; the format didn’t exclude the sensibilities of introverts. It was up to the user on how little they wanted shared about their personal life, and how much you chose to embellish your online self with your own aesthetic or idealogical flourishes.
A digital gallery of self-proclaimed shut-ins obviously produced total madness sometimes, but Tumblr does not exist as clearly within the public consciousness anymore. Some put it down to the growing population of its users; they suggest it’s denizens have simply grown bored with it.
If that were the case though, wouldn’t Facebook, or Twitter, have become redundant too? A more analytical person might pin it down to changes made to the website in order to make it more sellable, as its creators thought about putting it on the market. However, in the process the things that made it unique, the aspects that separated it enough from Facebook, began to be lost.
Eventually sold to Yahoo, a great deal of its content was censored (mostly porn but also the tasteful nudes typical of Tumblr) so that it could be monetised more easily. In response, traffic on the site has decreased by 30%.
As we all should know, “code” is not ideologically neutral – algorithms are very much designed to meet the specifications and interests of capital. The way online forums function are not distanced from the oppressive trends that make up the IRL world, probably because so many of the people building these algorithms have something to gain from working that way, or are predominantly men.
There’s a whole separate essay to write about the rise of the “finsta” (second private instagram) and how it’s a response to shifts towards publicness in social media. But for now, I mourn a time where one website met all my needs.
Many of us have become used to the invulnerability of presenting a curated online self. I don’t know exactly how to rethink the way we approach social media and engage with it especially because IRL and URL experiences are now 100% informed by each other.
But putting in the extra effort to connect with people who share our experiences IRL in all their messiness is one I’ve found fruitful, even if it means challenging my complacency, and moving away from the masks of an online identity that may have once felt emancipatory.
Jonno Revanche is a writer and critic currently based between Adelaide and Sydney.
