 20071106 I’ll Tumble 4 Ya
I was remiss not to add my thoughts to Ricky's post about Tumblr yesterday:Tumbling reminds of when I was in 7th grade and dated a girl at another school. We only saw each other on the weekends, but we spent every weeknight on the phone for at least 3 hours. We didn't say much -- we just watched TV apart, often the same channel, and would repeat funny parts to each other. I subscribe to 25 tumbles, and of those friends, I've only seen 7 in the past month. There are many unique reasons why I haven't met with any particular one of them, but that's an accessory to my lament: passive relationships aren't fulfilling but that's all we seem to have time for. Tumblr is thrilling because it's dispelled the maintenance guilt associated with blogs and relationships, usually manifested by apologies like Sorry I haven't posted/called in awhile -- been busy. Instead, we're seeing the opposite. Users are rabidly posting and proselytizing and keeping tabs on each other. I'm seeing people post 10 items a day who only a month ago had never blogged before. What I boiled out of Ricky's editorial is that Tumblr is a useful and addictice service with an occasional side-affect of overusage and repeating, meaning that we're sharing bundles with each other, but we're not saying much. I agree that it's happening and that it's underwhelming in an overwhelming way, but most importanly it isn't sustainable and will evolve. It's a great service because it allows us busy folk to post lots of content quickly -- but it begs the question: When do we have the time digest each other's output? It's only a matter of time before this disparity balances and we find a sensible way to include Tumbling and Twittering in our lives, in a way that promotes active relationships and distribution of creative thought. Here's room for invention -- we must make useful meaning of all these feeds! Otherwise, it's possible that might we devolve to the point where we're all just sitting in front of monitors watching each other, caught in a mindless feedback loop, staring and creating nothing at all. If anything is certain, Tumblr is a superior publishing tool that will trump the current jokers as the blogging platform of choice. If it's any indication, I'm tumbling while I decide whether or not to switch to their backend after 7 loyal years with Blogger. 5
Comments:
ben said... Awesome (following you on tumblr!). 9:04 PM Jessica said... I wasnt sure at first but once i got into the swing of it i really found myself loving tumblr. I love that it's so easy to use (seriously, i'm a nitwit when it comes to anything computer-y), i love that it's non-ugly and that it's easy to customize. Even though there is a trend to post everything and anything that pops into your mind it's not like you have to. You could treat it as a normal blog. Even add comments. But the good thing is that posts tend to be short and so you can read a lot and not feel drained by it. (That's how i feel anyway.) I just think tumblr makes blogging fun. I feel like it takes the pressure off. Oh! And i love that you can "follow" people so that everyone's posts are all on the same page. That comes in real handy. So, for me, tumblr = great! 10:02 PM Ricky said... This is a good write-up. I'm glad that you noticed the jist of my post wasn't criticizing the Tumblr software (wich is great), but the blogarrhea that it's currently causing. I am also trying out Tumblr now and will see if it has the same bowel-liquefying effect on me. 10:26 PM Jessica said... Oh, just to add. Tumblr, depending on how you use it, has a bit of a scrapbook feel to it. I can't remember who said it, but someone thought an export feature so you could make your tumblr into a book would be a really neat idea. I think that's actually kind of awesome and it would make you want to have a bit of 'pride' in your tumblr and not abuse it by posting nonsense. 12:28 AM dalas v. said... Yeah, I have had the feeling while reading my Tumblr dashboard, "This is too much. I don't have time to read all of this." 2:32 AM Post a Comment |
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 Hi, I'm Zach. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana and graduated from Wake Forest. After college, I moved to Manhattan to get serious about a company I ran with friends. We sold it to Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp in 2006. I just wrapped up with a project I co-founded called Vimeo and left CV to focus on being a twenty-five year old. I have another blog called Copy and Taste, where I post about learning to cook. I live in Brooklyn now.  Del.icio.us My Flickr Me on Flickr Last.fm Linked in MySpace Netflix History Vimeo  Amir Blumenfeld Chris Bodenner Mareen Fischinger Fort Wayne Observed Nick Gray Hype Machine Jake and Amir Jakob Lodwick Oh My Rockness Jonathan Marcus Youngna Park Megan Scheminske Eliot Shepard Shorpy Signal vs. Noise Alex Soth Stereogum Ricky Van Veen Khoi Vinh Eugene Wyatt   Postal Skype SMS (via AIM) |