Rough Draft for Response Essay #4: New Media

There are thousands of blogs, vlogs, pod-casts  and videos that can be seen from anywhere in the virtual world we call the Internet. We live in a digital age where anything and everything can be uploaded and be seen to thousands of viewers across the world. Some say that this brings people who would of otherwise never meet or even know each connected via social networking sites. Connecting with an individual is something that is required for human beings to be sane. It’s a trait that the species has acquired over its evolution and kept for safe keeping. Blogs and vlogs accomplish that rule and let everyone who chooses to follow or watch access into their inner daily lives and social habits. This new type of socializing was demanded by users of the internet and many different networking sites appeared, all trying to achieving the same goal for the users. Just as with evolution, the strongest and well adapted, Facebook and Twitter, survived and gained popularity, while others, like MySpace, were left in the dark, abandoned. Others through we caught in the between of these two polar extremes and slowly gained users and hosts.

Tumblr was one of these sites caught in-between this popularity contest. Tumblr, by definition, is a site that hosts numerous amounts of blogs, all featuring something a little different than the last one. These blogs can reblog posts from other blogs and those blogs can reblog posts from other blogs and so on and so on. On goes a continuous cycle of reblogging which can be formally expressed as the recycle system. A post is created- anything from photos, to texts to audios and videos- another user sees the post and can chose to either like it or reblog and then another user reblogs the post and it gains, using a Tumblr word, notes. The higher the notes, the more popular and liked the post is by the users. This becomes a goal for some Tumblr users so they try to gain as many followers as they can by creating a successful post.

 As of right now Tumblr’s highest text post is this: 

As of now the post has gained another 2 million notes and ranks up to almost 10 million notes. Now as a reminder, Tumblr is not at composed of adults or elderly people who own their own houses, have a family to support, and career’s to worry about. Tumblr is mostly a demographic of teens and young adults, maybe 12- 25 years old. Most users still live with their parents or live in apartments and are going to college or still attending high school.

This post says so much about our generation. Most people, parents and the elderly, thought since the use of phones, computers, laptops, and MP3 players that we, the young adults, were completely unaware of what was going around us. Yet this post and its huge amount of notes it received, proved otherwise. That our “message” was yeah, we know what’s going on with our country and politics and yeah we might be too young to vote or say something about it but you better bet that we are going to voice our opinion one way or another. It shows the connectivity and agreement that the users have in common with one other. That the users, all from different parts of the country and some from different parts of the world, agreed with this statement and reblogged for others to see it. One person shared their opinion thinking that it wasn't going to accumulate a lot of notes (a big trend on Tumblr is to try and get as many notes on a post you created) when in fact it was something that everyone agreed on and liked. The post not only states a something that the majority also thought but added a sense of humor by stating “pass it on” like the game telephone we used to play as kids.

This is Tumblr’s new media "message".  Young adults from all over the world share their opinions and create posts to help others get through whatever they are going through. The users, who might never see the one another in person, can share opinion and beliefs, personalities, and senses of humor over some post. Tumblr is like a web of connection spread across the world. Users can talk about anything and everything from fandoms (a fan base composed of fans from a certain movie or show) to school problems and sometimes personally issues back to things that have nothing to do with life and are just there for the sake of making people laugh. As sappy and gooey is it sounds (the site is made up of teenagers, kids) Tumblr is like a jellybean machine. You’ll always get some new random flavor, sometimes you might like it and sometimes it might think it is really disturbing that someone created a flavor like that but either way you'll come back and see what's new and exciting.