I Tumble For Ya! Part Two: A world Full Of Dorians

 ‘We live in an age of Dorians, admiring themselves in webcams, phone cams and online profiles. If there’s a picture in the attic you can be sure it’s been photoshopped.’ – Mark Simpson

‘All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.’   Jean Baudrillard

I am, I am, I am

I have already grieved for the Death Of The Reader . The tumblr generation is not interested in my loss though. It is too busy uploading photos of itself to post on its tumblr page. A photo of yourself taken in the mirror with your iphone says more than any 2,000 word blogpost can, anyway. If tumblr was a quote from Sylvia Plath (and there is in fact a tumblr of people with Sylvia Plath tattoos) it might be:

‘ I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.’

(From The Bell Jar)

In tumblr land, the individual self is paramount. ‘Neo-liberal individualism’,  the ethos which could be said to underpin contemporary economics and society, expresses itself poignantly and effectively via tumblr. It also goes back a long way, and is very complex. John Stuart Mill, for example, believed that the ‘sovereignty’ of the individual was vital to achieve social justice.

“Over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign” — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), “Introductory”

Rather than going into the labrynth of the tensions between ‘collectivism’ and ‘individualism’, all I am saying here, is that if you browse tumblr for five minutes or more, you will have those words echoing in your ears, ‘I am, I am, I am….’ And that this says something about  our attitude to ‘the self’ in the contemporary world.

Branding The Self

The ‘individualism’ as the key philosophy of these Dorians, is summed up by a quote posted on a tumblr called No Secrets Between Sailors :

‘The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.’

So the ‘self’ is reified as somehow bravely distinguishing itself from the ‘tribe’. The masses. Do the tumblr generation manage to distinguish themselves as individuals though? That is my next question.

Young, (usually white, often American) people are producing themselves as brands via the mixed media available in tumblr: Photos, text, video, audio. This is the entrepreneurial self, a la  Charles Leadbeater , ‘armed with a laptop, a modem and some contacts’. But tumblr entrepreneurs are also armed (as is Charlie if he’d only admit it) with something even more potent: a narcissism and a (metro)sexual ego, that up till now just did not have the means to show itself off effectively.

If you visit someone’s tumblr page, then, it is a bit like going round to their house. They present themselves as they want to be seen. And, just as the explosion of home décor as hobby and self-expression a few years ago, led to millions of people demonstrating their unique individual style and taste, in exactly the same way, so did tumblr help to create a world of virtual display cabinets, full of identikit mini-mes.

I am not saying these specimens don’t look very pretty, or that they don’t use the technology and its opportunities for self-branding creatively. Far from it. Venture into the maze of tumblr and you can find yourself lost among the beautiful artefacts for hours. But the overall effect, whether you are looking at porn (of which there is possibly an infinite supply, or men’s fashion ( a close second in terms of volume), or emo girls with tattoos who write poetry (may be in at number 3), is always the same. A blank, sexless, mediated gallery of Dorian Grays stare back at you.

As Mark Simpson put it, in a discussion under his piece about The Dorian Gray Age:

‘Narcissism is outside of tradition. It’s literally self-referential. So narcissism is both a product of and a helpmeet to rapid change – producing ‘individuals’ in identical loft apartments.’ http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2009/09/11/ours-is-the-dorian-gray-age/#comments

This ‘individual’ self-branding, that actually is just producing an army of postmodern image soldiers,  fits in and merges with how ‘branding’ occurs in capitalism. As Naomi Klein wrote in her best work, No Logo, once the individual self is marketed back to itself, it kind of loses its individuality. If everyone has to wear Nike trainers in order to avoid being ‘overwhelmed by the tribe’, then they have failed, but Nike has done very well out of the ‘myth’ of the individual expressing him/herself, thank you very much.

‘Since many of today’s best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and “brand” them, these companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images. Manufacturing products may require drills, furnaces, hammers and the like, but creating a brand calls for a completely different set of tools and materials. It requires an endless parade of brand extensions, continuously renewed imagery for marketing and, most of all, fresh new spaces to disseminate the brand’s idea of itself.’

Even more abstract was Absolut Vodka, which for some years now had been developing a marketing strategy in which its product disappeared and its brand was nothing but a blank bottle-shaped space that could be filled with whatever content a particular audience most wanted from its brands: intellectual in Harper’s, futuristic in Wired, alternative in Spin, loud and proud in Out and “Absolut Centerfold” in Playboy. The brand reinvented itself as a cultural sponge, soaking up and morphing to its surroundings.’

As the photo above demonstrates, tumblr really should be sponsored by Apple, because the amount of free advertising the company gets through all these iphone self-photos is phenomenal. I have said before, I will not be surprised if tumblr begins to include formal product placement and sponsorship, rather than this ‘accidental’ variety in the not-too-distant future. The word ‘branding’ seems so very apt to me. People are showing themselves to the world, via tumblr, literally ‘branded’ on their bodies by consumer corporations.

http://www.theapplecollection.com/Collection/objects/tattoo.shtml

London Preppy- Metro Entrepreneur

 London Preppy is an archetypal tumblr metrosexual entrepreneur of the self. He graduated to tumblr from the old, clapped out Blogger interface (which he still managed to emblazen with an image of his muscly torso).

He now has a new book due out, to go with his six pack. ‘Nihilistic 21st century urban stories’ does not really tell us anything, except that the author thinks he is leading the Zeitgeist. But in a way he is, because he is re-imagining how people (and the most successful at doing it are young, buff, pretty boys) sell themselves to the world as product. I look at him looking at us, looking at him, clutching his creative output to his shiny hyper-real form, and I wonder why I, a mere mortal, bother to create anything at all. He doesn’t seem to want you to read his book so much as admire how it sets off his abs so perfectly. And proves that he is ‘a creative’. Not just a pretty body. Though what a pretty body it is.

He admits, almost proudly, that when he does readings, he ‘speaks to the floor’, suggesting an endearing shyness beyond this brazen exhibitionistic exterior. Or maybe he is just looking down at his enormous cock.

http://london-preppy.tumblr.com/post/6659951561/unlike-the-others-id-do-anything-im-not-the

London Preppy is just one of thousands or maybe millions of bodies that look just like this, on tumblr, most of which are not accessorised with a novel, and many of which are actually butt naked. Because pornography, particularly the male variety, whether it is self-taken photos in mirrors, or actual man on man homosex, is probably the main output of tumblr. Even sites dedicated to ‘style’ or ‘books’ refer to the porno aspect of the platform: ‘bookshelf porn’, ‘cabin porn’, cupcake porn, everything on tumblr is aimed to arouse the viewer (or more likely the person showing off the porn on tumblr). And again, Baudrillard springs to mind:

‘At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance’- Baudrillard.

Because somewhere along the line, no matter how many oiled up pecs and abs are reblogged and photoshopped, tumblr takes the sex out of, well, everything.

Fuck Yeah Menswear

Tumblr land is huge. There are masses of  ‘themes’ of tumblr sites: pornography, tattoos, mirror shots, emo girls, designer objects, ‘art’, cartoons, it goes on and on and on. And as I said above, in a way, it is all porn.  But the one word that keeps coming back to me if I do a kind of tumblr word-association, is menswear. Menswear, menswear, menswear. That is what tumblr seems to be about to me.

The sheer volume of men’s style tumblrs is indicated by this blogpost, which celebrates  Another 100 incredible tumblr blogs for men’s fashion ! Suggesting there are legions of the things.

Even sites which are not dedicated to men’s fashion, seem to be showcases for men’s fashion and style. This one sums up the ‘esprit’ I think, with its title ‘the pursuit aesthetic’. Men, and men’s fashion, are the contemporary visual ‘aesthetic’ de nos jours. http://thepursuitaesthetic.tumblr.com/ 

So this rather lonely looking rack of  pastel shade shirts, is saying something to us about ‘identity’ and ‘image’ and ‘values’ in the post-modern tumblr generation. I think it is saying that metrosexuality is what makes the world go round, bitches.

New York Magazine puts it rather unkindly, when it says:

‘Witness the cultural burp known as metrosexuality. As the hipster ambles from the thrift store to a $100 haircut at Freemans Sporting Club, these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod.’

http://nymag.com/news/features/69129/index2.html

I think the article plays down the social/cultural  impact of metrosexuality (cultural burp? I don’t think so) and plays up ‘hipster’ culture. But the atmosphere it portrays seems to fit tumblr land. Here, the ‘self’ is the ‘product’ that is going to be uploaded onto tumblr, and then re-arranged, repackaged, and replayed, like ‘a shuffled playlist on an ipod’ over and over again.

The ‘aesthetic’ of men’s fashion that is being pursued on this and what seems like an interminable amount of tumblrs, is also an expression of the neo-liberal individual ‘free man’ of  Ayn Rand ‘s dreams.

Here he is, driving in a vintage convertible, the wind in his air, the open road at his feet:

And here is his loft apartment for when he wants to get back to city living. It is all so Patrick Bateman, isn’t it?

And indeed, this extract from American Psycho indicates the importance of menswear to the post-modern psychopath, I mean metrosexual man:

‘Oh wait guys, listen, I got a joke’. Preston rubs his hands together.

‘Preston’, Price says, ‘You are a joke. You do know you weren’t invited to dinner. By the way, nice jacket, non-matching but complementary’.

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/08-09/0809lewisstylistics.pdf

Unhappy Hipsters

As I wrote in the last piece, on Death Of The Reader, the kids of tumblr land are post-ironic. They somehow manage to create internet memes and knowing winks about their own habits and identities, so that nobody else can critique them first. And, the ultimate knowing wink I have found on tumblr, is of course, called Fuck Yeah Menswear

On first glance, Fuck Yeah Menswear looks like the myriad of other men’s fashion and style blogs on tumblr. It probably takes its photos from those very sites. But it is in fact, a commentary on them, and on the ‘tumblr generation’ as a whole, with its obsession with metrosexual men’s imagery, and being admired and adored, via the reblog button. It is also poetic, as this stanza shows:

‘Head hung low.

Ashamed of sartorial tomfoolery.

These shades gon cost you.

This fade gon cost you.

Unfollowing ya boy gon cost you.

I get paid for reblogs fool.

Pocket square, bracelets, lapel tool.’

I remarked to Mark Simpson when I first saw the site: ‘Fuck Yeah Menswear is ‘a literate Mike The Situation Sorentino, transported from Jersey Shore to The Hamptons via Williamsburgh. This has really done my head in. He has subsumed everything into his steeze, bros’.

And Mark added, ominously: ‘Just to add to the scariness, it often sounds like FYM is channelling metrosexual murderer Patrick Bateman: ‘I am the style Lorax. I speak for the steez.’

As FYM does to men’s fashion tumblrs, Unhappy Hipsters does to the thousands of ‘architecture’ and ‘design’ and ‘lifestyle’ tumblr pages. Often these are intermingled anyway, so menswear and ‘lifestyle’ are showcased side by side. I mean, you need a sharp outfit if you are going to live in a place like this, right?

‘Letting her choose between the red and white quinoa was the first phase of her home-school lessons in self-construction, liberty, and spontaneous activity.’

Just like FYM, I suspect that Unhappy Hipsters get their photos from actual tumblrs, adding a further ‘internet will eat itself’ dimension to the (post) ironic satire. Everyone is an ‘architect’ now, if not of their actual self-build designer homes, then at least of themselves. Comparing tumblr, which I did above, to the craze for self-expression via ‘home décor’, makes sense then, because tumblr is full of actual home décor imagery.

Unhappy Hipsters, again in a similar way to FYM, manages to critique this obsession with ‘style’ as empty and pretentious and probably unfulfilling, whilst also reproducing the very imagery it is criticising. I wonder if the people behind UH are actually architects or interior designers themselves, just as I am pretty sure the person behind FYM works somehow in the men’s fashion industry. Basically, Fuck Yeah Menswear and Unhappy Hipsters are saying, ‘don’t even try to resist, because everything you do or say will get eaten up by this monster anyway’. There is nothing for it but to get yourself an iphone and a tumblr and join the party.

America 2.0

‘Baudrillard saw America as a glittering emptiness, a savage, empty non-culture, in short, as the purest symbol of the hyperreal culture of the postmodern age.’

http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/baudrillard1.htm

Tumblr is a Baurdrillardian dream/nightmare. It is like going on that journey with the French postmodern philosopher,  not in 1986, but in 2011, and not in antiquated RL, but in the comfort and splendour of the internet. Tumblr is Baudrillard’s America 2.0.

“The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert, and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them: the mindless luxury of a rich civilization”

-Jean Baudrillard, America (1986)

Whether it is via the romance of the American landscape shown in Cabin Porn, or nostalgia for the original authentic Wild West , or images of more modern American Pop Art, tumblr is selling America back to itself and reblogging it round the globe. Whilst I think Roland Barthes would be horrified at the way the tumblr generation has not only completely rejected even any notion of the ‘author’, but has also done away with the reader, and even meaning itself, I have a sneaking suspicion Baudrillard might quite enjoy tumblr. At the very least, he would be able to sit back in his comfy armchair in the sky, should someone bring him an i-pad and some reading glasses, and say, with well deserved satisfaction: ‘I. Told. You. So’.

————————————————————————————————–

Thanks to Mark Simpson for some tumblr links and for talking to me about this age of Dorians (and Patrick Batemans) we live in. I think like Barthes would be, Simpson is a bit horrified by tumblr (despite the pretty Dorians). But it is his work and his insights that have helped me get a grip on the tumblr generation.

Metrosexy by Mark Simpson is available on Amazon Kindle Here

I Tumble For Ya! Part One: Death Of The Reader

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
— Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)

Reader, I Facebooked Him

Once a brand or a piece of technology becomes a verb, we know it is important. The ‘Macdonaldsisation’ of society seems to be near completion, but I suspect it still has a long way to go yet.

The verb: ‘to tumble’, is one that has not quite reached the middle class, middle aged ‘twitterati’ yet. But it is possibly more important than ‘facebooked’, ‘to tweet’, or the soon-to-be ubiquitous, no doubt, ‘Kindling’. (Isn’t that cute? How kindling is the last thing we could make out of the murderer of the dead tree press?).

Tumblr, the micro-blogging site that’s been going, and growing, since 2007 is a cross between twitter, facebook and personal blogs. In other words, it is the mutant alien baby of social networking And it is the one that all the cool cats are using with the most gusto. So it is probably about time we took notice of it.

‘Weblogs? Been there, done that. Facebook? It’s full of kids. Twitter? That’s so 2006, darling. No, the smart thing to be doing online these days is tumblelogging, which is to weblogs what text messages are to email – short, to the point, and direct.’

-The Daily Telegraph http://www.tumblr.com/about                                     

Too Long, Didn’t Read

Even if you don’t use tumblr or haven’t even heard of it (where have you been, granddad?) , you will have been feeling its effects. Take blogging: once a new exciting form of communication, it has already been irrevocably damaged by the tumblr generation of internet users. Twitter, for example, one of the templates that tumblr is based on, is well-known as he place where people say in 140 characters what they simply could not be bothered to say in any more.

This interesting  blogger seems to share my fears:

‘Is blogging dead? I don’t want it to be, which is another reason I tried to revivify this blog, which was about 10 years old and staggering around like a zombie. In my opinion, there should be room in our online discourse for blogs like this one — offering a consistent, often thoughtful perspective, collecting and observing things of interest to its readers. But being consistent, thoughtful, and observant requires effort and time, and it requires the same of its audience.

And that, I think, is why blogging, for the most part, appears to be moribund: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc., are media that have evolved such that there is no expectation of prolonged engagement with pieces of content on the part of their writers or readers. Consider the recent widespread use of the shorthand “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read). This dismissive assessment is commonly interpreted as fair, expected criticism of the author, not the reader who offers it because he couldn’t be bothered to read the content simply because it was long, regardless of its undiscovered merits. The media that are replacing “traditional” blogging value brevity above all, so much of the incentive to write anything that is both long and thoughtful diminishes (since few will bother to read it), and the self-motivation required to do so will only increase over time’.

It’s funny to be talking about blogging — which for its entire lifespan has been dismissed broadly for being superficial and narcissistic — as being a besieged outpost of well-developed, thoughtful writing, but I think that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s no one’s “fault” — it’s just the natural evolution of popular content production and consumption towards the most frictionless state: from books to periodicals to personal websites to blogs to Twitter to the Like button. When a medium comes along that’s easier than clicking the Like button — maybe thinking you Like something — you can be sure everyone will speculate about and then bemoan its death before moving on’ .

Or as this cartoon, aptly puts it, in much fewer words: Nobody Reads.

http://www.stickycomics.com/nobody-reads-my-blog/

The Death of Dialogue

If nobody is really reading in an engaged manner anymore, then how are they expected to discuss ideas and opinions? Is dialogue itself dying on its feet?

In my corner of the internet, the middle class, media class corner, people still seem to be engaged in the old-fashioned activities of writing, and ‘reading’ copious amounts of words. Many tweets link to articles, blogposts, ezines and even books. What has changed, is how we interact with these texts via the internet. A couple of years ago, when I first started participating seriously in the ‘blogosphere’, blogs seemed to be about generating discussion, inspiring further blogs and writing, and encouraging debate. Nowadays, even well frequented blogs often have few comments ‘below the line’ or else they have lots of comments by very few commenters (ahem. ‘QRG’ has been known to be one such unstoppable commenter on one or two blogs).

Tumblr, with its photos, videos and cartoons, seems to highlight how people are not discussing, or reading anything in the coolest part of the internet at all, but rather are engaged in a sophisticated session of ‘show and tell’. But  this dissipation of debate is not all down to tumblr of course. Haven’t we been bemoaning the death of the intellectual, and the death of traditional media discourse for a long time now?

Roland Barthes wrote his groundbreaking essay, Death of The Author, in 1967- over 40 years ago! He hailed the ‘reader’ as the most important actor in terms of making a meaning out of a text:

‘Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.’

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm

Now, in 2011, I think it is fair to declare not only the death of the author, but also the ‘death of the reader’. The ‘destination’ of Roland Barthes texts, is now a harassed person at a lap top or on an i-phone, trying to negotiate between twitter, facebook, email and websites, maybe whilst sitting in a taxi or walking to work or taking calls. Or if it is a young member of the ‘tumblr generation’ it is someone who does not really care to read at all, except to check if there is something ‘cool’ they can put on their tumblr page. In order to have intelligent reasoned dialogue, as the blogger above suggested, we need to have engaged readers.

If we take media sites such as Comment Is Free, connected to The Guardian newspaper, maybe we should expect to find some ‘readers’ left there. Cif shows that  people are reading and discussing articles, and ‘below the line’ commenters are still out there. But the contempt that many journalists feel for the ‘trolls’ who occupy that space is telling. They don’t want to be challenged on their content. They want to use social media like everyone else does, to promote themselves and their ‘brand’, not to be held to account by inconvenient readers. Maybe these journalists should put their work on tumblr, because they would be delighted to find that almost nobody comments on anything there. For me, ‘reading’ is akin to ‘listening’, which is an essential part of social discourse and dialogue. So, as well as saying, with a sigh, ‘nobody reads’, I might also say, with an even bigger sigh, ‘nobody listens’.

As this astute social media commentator has written, social media are not about reading, dialogue and discussion of ideas anyway, so bemoaning the fact they don’t fulfil that function is pointless: they are about networking.

‘Apparently Google+ is going to end blogging once and for all. First blogging was co-opted by big media. Second, blogging was trumped by short-form social media.

In this framework the death of blogging can be summed up in one paragraph:

Remember blog rolls? Looking back, we can say they were the original Facebook Friend lists, or Twitter Followers, or Google+ Circles. In other words, the network is more important than the content. Facebook and Twitter and Google, each in their own way, make networking very easy. But when everyone is networked, what will everyone do next? Don’t say content. Content is hard.

http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/2011/07/the-death-of-blogging-in-one-paragraph/

The Case of Schrodinger’s Rapist

So, if discussion and dialogue is not functioning online at all well, how do people do politics in tumblr land? Does anyone try and put serious points across at all? The answer to that is yes. But  this may not necessarily be a good thing.

‘The average Tumblr user creates 14 original posts each month, and reblogs 3. Half of those posts are photos. The rest are split between text, links, quotes, music, and video.

What is reblogging? The same way YouTube embeds make it easy for a video to become a viral hit, the “reblog” button on all Tumblr posts allows a meme to spread rapidly across thousands of blogs with just a click’

http://www.tumblr.com/about

We might call this one-click reblogging, ‘the tumblr effect’. An example of this ‘tumblr effect’ is a post called Schrodinger’s Rapist. This was an article in 2009 on a blog by someone who went by the name of ‘Starling’, which was a variation on the feminist meme of ‘all men are potential rapists’. It was reblogged into infamy, and is now considered a major feminist text of recent years. If you put ‘Schrodinger’s Rapist’ into Google search, you will see just how popular it has become.

http://librariansoul.tumblr.com/post/4733768985/try-to-explain-rape-culture-to-upper-middleclass

Feminists are one of the few groups of people who use tumblr to write and talk about politics. I think this is because on tumblr, nobody can here you dissent. It is a promotional machine, and feminism 2.0 is all about promoting a narrow, specific dogma, a dogma that is popular with many women from the tumblr generation, because it prioritises the individual, white, middle class (young) woman as the centre of the universe. So now if you say ‘Schrodinger’s Rapist’ people think you are talking about something that has stood the test of debate, of time, of the tumblr generation’s only method of validation. Lots of people reblogged it so it must be true. The ‘real world’ impact of this tumblr effect, can be seen in things like the Slutwalk demos, where thousands of feminists marched against ‘slut shaming’. There, through speeches, slogans, placards, the concept of ‘rape culture’, as promoted by articles such as Schrodinger’s Rapist was reinforced. And it was reiterated in reports of the Slutwalks, in newspapers, magazines and social media sites globally.

Blogger as Fossil

Elise Moore writes a wonderful blog, The Autobiography of  A Soul:

http://autobiographyofasoul.blogspot.com/2011/01/lets-not-pretend.html

One thing I like about it, is she is clinging on for dear life, as Leonardo de Caprio clung onto that iceberg in Titanic, to the idea that blogging, and intellectual discourse are not completely and utterly dead in the frozen water:

‘ To write and to be an intellectual was once, recently, to craft a persona that had nothing in common with one’s mundane private self; that was, perhaps, precisely an escape from it; to craft a self that was smarter, sharper, more elegant and eloquent. I dearly love all of these critics as much for their personas – or their variations on the critic-persona they bequeathed to us – as for their prose and ideas, but it seems to me that as a medium, the blog is far too informal to support such persona-building, which requires an absolute separation between public and private self. Even when a blog is not meant to be about the person writing it, it retains certain characteristics in common with its online “sister forms,” the journal or diary. Professional critics affiliated with respectable print journals often maintain a blog to say, “Hey – look at me, I’m a real person! I can talk like a normal person and express casual, personal opinions that are not necessarily my considered professional opinion!” The blogging form is inherently, well, non-pretentious. Even if you’re as pretentious as me.

Can you picture Sontag with a blog? In a blogging world we could never have had a Sontag or a Trilling; they would have had to democratically puncture their elitist personas. And that would have been a shame. But we did have them, issuing from the world of 20^th century literary journalism; and now we have a different model, which, while no doubt throwing up its own celebrities (and more of them), may never allow for the level of intellectual celebrity of the great 20^th century American critics, simply because there are too many of us. But there’s nothing wrong with changing the face of intellectual inquiry en masse.’

http://bookshelfporn.com/

In a discussion on Mark Simpson’s blog, about his own essay on SusanSontag and ‘the death of the intellectual’, we came up with what is probably a more realistic summary of the state of both intellectual inquiry and blogging:

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/01/18/does-my-brain-look-big-in-this/

QRG: Emily Dickinson was totally queer and totally ahead of her time. She was a woman out of time. And she genuinely shunned publicity.

‘I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ‘s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They ‘d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!’

Sums up the modern condition, really.

Mark S:  ‘Frog’ also helpfully rhymes with ‘blog’.

And these days, if you want to be ‘admired’ it is much more effective to post photos of yourself on tumblr or facebook, or to boast about your achievements on twitter, than it is to bother doing anything so archaic as writing, thinking, reading and discussing ideas. Or indeed blogging.

The End Of Meaning

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
— Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)

This quote by Baudrillard that I posted at the top of this piece, really sums up everything I want to say about the death of blogging in tumblr land. When the author no longer has any authority, when we are saturated with information, and when readers do not even really read anymore, how can anything mean anything? And who can claim ownership of ‘ideas’?

Charles Leadbeater, a pioneer for the postmodern ‘knowledge economy’, http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/home.aspx says that the author and the reader don’t matter so much anymore, because the motto of the current internet generation is ‘we are what we share’. Knowledge, ideas, content all go into this lovely mixing pot. But apart from the fact that his pseudo post-socialist ideal is disingenuous, (I know that Charlie is very much a paid up member of the neo-liberal Me, Me, Me generation), I think the idea of ‘sharing’ in tumblr land is pretty well fucked. I think a better motto might be, ‘I am what you see’. And if you see it on my tumblr page, it’s mine.

In reblogging a tumblr post, unlike on twitter, you can cut or edit or add to it as much as you like, before you repost it on your own tumblr page. This means the original ‘author’ of the post has little control over what happens to it once it is released into the wilds of the tumblr jungle. It can be traced back to the originator, but I doubt people try to do so.

Personally, I don’t put any of my original writings on tumblr. I risk enough putting them on my own blog. But at least if people ‘steal’ content from my blog they have to do it blatantly. On tumblr, the model is designed for out and out theft. Or rather it doesn’t believe in intellectual property in the first place.

Along with the death of discourse, and the technology that  goes with it, is a kind of ‘justification’ for the state we are in. The ‘way of being’ that represents the end of meaning is ‘post-ironic’, nobody cares, hipster type attitudes. ‘Whatevs’ could be the motto of the tumblr generation, when they are talking about people and work other than themselves and their own. And ‘ONLY JOKING!’ could be the subtitle of any ‘serious’ article or statement made by anyone. If nothing means anything, nobody has to mean what they say. Right?

As Steve Sparshott has written:

‘The hipster conforms to a simple definition of postmodernism – it’s defined by what it isn’t. It’s a cult of self, fostering delusions of creativity in which anyone can be a writer (all you need is a blog), a photographer (if you have a telephone), a DJ (iTunes) or a stylist (you wear clothes)….They take photographs of, and blog about, themselves and their friends. Nobody else sees or cares about the results of their labour, which is fine, because they don’t care about anybody else. It’s this blinkered self-centredness that, for me, promotes them from an amusing irritation to a real problem.’

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/ssparshott/2010/09/your-life-as-a-dickhead/
Or as the New York Magazine put it:

‘In the nineties, it had become commonplace to assume that one could no longer say heartfelt, sincere things outright, because all genuine utterance would be stolen and repeated as advertising. Whatever anguish this caused seemed gone in the artifacts of the early aughts. The ironic games were weightless. The emotional expressions suggested therapy culture, but hipster art often kitschified—or at least made playful—the weightiest tragedies, whether personal or historical: orphans and cancer for Eggers, the Holocaust and 9/11 for Jonathan Safran Foer’.

http://nymag.com/news/features/69129/index2.html

It is in this age of ‘meaninglessness’,  and ‘kitchified…tragedies’ that the internet ‘meme’ has flourished, particularly, unsurprisingly, on tumblr.

The UK riots were captured and butchered on ‘photoshoplooter’ tumblr, a spoof, in itself of the other ‘serious’ tumblr, ‘Catch A Looter’ aimed at indentifying participants in the riots by posting photos on tumblr.

And feminists, those well known believers in ‘debate’ and ‘rational discussion’, produced ‘Privilege Denying Dude’, who was supposed to represent the arrogance and misogyny of white middle class men. But their ‘irony’ was lost on me, because I actually found myself agreeing with much of what PDD said!  And, if you are reduced to using internet memes to make your political points, haven’t you lost the argument? Or am I just behind the times?

Coming Up in Part Two: A World Full of Dorians: How Tumblr Provides a Showcase for Metrosexual Mini Mes.