Tumblr: The Affect Engine

Cho’s article “Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time” discusses the definitions of Queer Temporarily, Affect and the notion of Ghostly figures, as well as goes into detail about how Tumblr can be read as a Queer Space that embodies these definitions. To Cho, Tumblr is read as a temporal space in which thousands of disjoint and seemingly anonymous (through the often lack of creator attribution) images are posted, read, consumed, and revisited by a collective of anonymous users. The images can provide to viewers readings on images based on their locality to each other, and how they are traversed across Tumblr, creating affect through their juxtaposition to these read meanings and emotions. “Queer Reverb” explores these possibilities, aiming towards educating the reader of his own experiences with Tumblr and this critical reading of its use.

What struck me as interesting in reading “Queer Reverb” was this question about how many pictures on Tumblr do end up without accreditation to their authors/creators. This lines up with the kinds of way Trolls use media to express themselves online, but with much different outcomes; as Cho described his experience with Tumblr as being a primarily “safe” LGBTQ space. On pictures without authors as well, it reminds me of Warner’s piece “Uncritical Reading” , which alludes to the gendering of the ways in which students are asked to do scholarly reading as being masculine (primarily fact based, based on logic, contextual importance) rather than feminine (primarily emotion based, the reactionary, empirical importance). The ways these images become tied together based on the Tumblr user’s choosing provides this sort of “Uncritical Reading” that opposes the ways we are taught to derive meaning and significance in what we could call a “work”; these images becoming a work in themselves, but without any more information tied to them than whatever “HTML and CSS” the user has framed them to and with others.

The discussion Cho brings up about the LGBT Spirit, purple, and the pictures of the six Facebook boys; an event that without this Queer Reverb machine that is Tumblr may of slipped through the cracks of our social conscious, piqued my interest as well. The ability of a user to compose an image of snippets from Facebook with a simple message, and have it traverse the net through Tumblr to the point where media and local groups react speaks volumes to the power of this “Affect Engine”. With Tumblr’s ability to have images reblogged, and have the origin disassociated with that image, this particular call for Spirit Day and the now late boys from Facebook can at any given moment come back to “haunt” our thoughts once again; and given the nature of reblogging be time obscured as well, creating this Queer Temporarily of the event.

I offer this as a place to go with “Queer Reverb”; Tumblr is community-identified as a place where “If you’re Homophobic, you won’t last long on the site”. What methods of Tumblr’s “engine”, to say the way it operates on images and its users, do you believe would be different if Tumblr weren’t perceived as such a place. Would it survive as a primarily “Heteronormative” website with practices of accreditation and content control that demands images to archived and critically analysed? And what kind of stories could be shared and explored with such a Tumblr? And to bring it back, what are some other creations we could imagine with such “Queer Reverb” engine that Cho suggests Tumblr to be?

Another Welcome!

Hello all! My name is Florence Rozario and I will be your undergraduate TA for this course. My duties are to act as a liaison between you and Dr. Lothian, in addition to being tech support, guest lecturer, secretary, etc.

Please contact me if you have any questions throughout the semester. I will do my best to respond to emails as soon as possible. My email is: florencebrozario@gmail.com. I do not have official office hours, but if you want to meet with me, please drop me an email and we will meet by appointment. I’m looking forward to a great semester!