Why Tumblr

Elmo Keep May 26

I’m sitting down finally this morning to write these program notes. My morning writing routine involves putting aside roughly two hours to read through my RSS feeds, to catch up as best I can on what’s been published overnight in any one of the dozens of outlets I regularly read. I bookmark the really long pieces to graze on throughout the day, but there’s usually one or two things I have to get all the way through before I can start working. Today it was a piece on NPR, The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything. In it, the writer, Linda Holmes, ruminates on the sheer volume of what is being produced in the culture, of what already has been produced, and how those things together mean that we’ll always be in some sort of poverty because we can never see it all. We can never hear all the records, watch all the films, read all books and gaze upon all the art in the world over the course of our lives, because there’s never been a time in history in which more information has been more easily available to more people, than now. Even a life dedicated to curiosity and considered absorption will make only a minute dent in all there is.

Which is terrific, Holmes concludes.

It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.

There is nowhere on the internet that exemplifies the near-infinite vastness of the culture rabbit hole more so than on Tumblr. When I mentioned the two hours I set aside for reading that was a lie, because it doesn’t include the time I spend on Tumblr, which, if I’m not careful, can easily become hours and sometimes (on deadlines, like this one) the entire day. Right now, for example, I’m reading about the Sweden Solar System, because in my Tumblr dashboard I’m following the Best of Wikipedia.

The Sweden Solar System is the world’s largest permanent scale model of the solar system. The sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea. It was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta Gahm. It is in the scale of 1:20 million.

Venus in Stockholm

I’m imaging taking a trip there and scavenging for all the planets strewn across the city and down the coast of the country. I’m also looking at photos of storm clouds gathering over Manhattan, watching a terrifying eyewitness video shot in the eye of a tornado and have ordered a print from a designer in Denver.

And that was just on the first page.

I follow around 85 blogs on Tumblr. It’s usually scrolling through 15-20 pages on the dashboard to catch up with them all. I follow a lot of other writers and journalists, as well as magazine mastheads, photographers, directors, designers and artists. Blogs that collate photos from Hollywood in the 1920s. Blogs that only post photos of animals on skateboards. Galleries of terrible tattoos. Blogs about memes. Then there’s a strange little sub-section of people I follow, who are people I don’t know at all but who I came across at one point or another at the end of a link line. These are people whose writing or art I enjoy, and who daily post little parts of their lives, using Tumblr as a journal. There’s one girl I’ve been following since I first started using the service about three years ago: she is twenty-two and lives in Chicago. She is a design graduate who has been looking for a job for over a year since she left university. She’s working in a café, more than a whole year of applying for job after job every week, and getting nothing. My heart breaks for her, and every day I check in with her hoping she will have caught a break today. She hasn’t yet, but every day she posts some of her work, something she’s doodled, or a photo of the skyline in the afternoon taken when she walked her dog; she often posts about the books she’s reading and shares excerpts and quotes which are often about the need to persevere. Her talent is clearly evident. She never complains about her situation, she just keeps plugging away, and in so doing is leaving a lovely little curated garden that I, on the other side of the world, am diligently reading every day without her even knowing that I’m crossing my fingers for her.

*

“To curate” originally meant in the 14th century, to be “a spiritual guide,” specifically one “responsible for the care (of souls)”. A curator was then a “guardian or overseer”, particularly of “minors and lunatics”. It was in mid-16th century London that it acquired its contemporary meaning: “one in charge of a museum or library.” Now everyone on Tumblr (and any number of other online spaces) is a curator. Tumblr’s “like” button function which lets you build a little library of things you’ve seen and want to share; the reblog function lets you take content straight from someone else’s blog and post it to your own with attribution. Tumblr has been very successful in integrating the use of hashtags to allow for browsing of its endless content. If you want to lose hours of your life to exploring, just click on the “design” or “art” or “LOL” tags and see where they take you.

In this space there is always the opportunity to encounter the sublime, to be delighted or enlightened or made to laugh or feel horrified all in the space of a moment. What an incredible moment to live in! In this kind of space, a space that is forever liminal and ephemeral, something is always becoming something else; it’s different every time you encounter it. And then it’s gone, a particular combination of images not to be repeated again. And that this is there for me, every day, is an insanely staggering reminder of all there is to see and how we’ll never see it all.

So it’s nice, to be here in this room with these images that will exist together in a cohesion for just this one time. I’m going to take a photo and post it to my Tumblr.

You can enjoy even more of Elmo’s work at her website Elmo Keep does stuff, and make sure to check out her excellent essay in the June edition of Meanjin.

Our Friends

• Overland
• Alien Onion
• Ampersand Duck
• Andrew McDonald
• A Pair of Ragged Claws
• Arts Victoria
• Australia Council for the Arts
• Ben Eltham
• Bookshow blog
• CAL
• City of Tongues
• Crikey
• darkly wise, rudely great
• David Astle
• Elmo Keep Does Stuff
• The Ember
• Fly the Falcon blog
• Going Down Swinging
• Griffith Review
• Hackpacker
• Harvest
• HEAT
• Island
• Killings blog
• Literary Minded
• Lorraine Crescent
• Lynden Barber
• Mandy Ord
• Marcus Westbury
• Matilda
• Meanland
• Melbourne University Publishing
• Mel Campbell
• The Monthly
• Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
• Oslo Davis
• Paul Callaghan
• Read, Think, Write
• Sleepers Publishing
• Sorrow at Sills Bend
• SPLOG
• Tom Cho
• Virgule
• Wet Ink
• Wheeler Centre

Comments