A Critique of Tumblr, et al.

"You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded." Alan Kirby, 2006, Philosophy Now

There are a plethora of social media forums where individuals can package and brand themselves, presenting their virtual avatar as a product for the world to see, hear, read, watch, respond to, "like", "poke", reblog, etc. This has greatly fueled what Alan Kirby calls the age of "pseudo-modernism" in which "pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenes physically in them." Kirby notes, "somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them."

What follows is a discussion of a few social media forums that I have started to use and my take on them.

Instagram

Late night I discovered Instagram, a photo editing and sharing app for the iPhone. Instagram allows you to edit photos within the app and post them to Instagram's own forum, and/or directly to other forums such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. I have started to edit my photographs and post them on Instagram, as well as follow a few friends. Instagram places the consumer behind the lens of those they follow with minimal text and no other distractions. You see what they see, albeit an impressionistic version due to editing and filtering.

Tumblr

I also discovered Tumblr last night. Tumblr is a microblog that allows you to share media as well as "reblog" media you enjoy and want to pass on. Reblogging takes away the onus of media creation and places the author in more of a curatorial role; collecting social text and compiling the pieces based on (hopefully) common aesthetic quality. The consumer can follow bloggers who might not create or post original media but who have a desirable aesthetic taste.

While Instagram is exclusively a forum for photographs, Tumblr lends itself best to image sharing but additionally has the capacity for text, video, quotes, links, and audio.

Blogger

Blogger, a more traditional blog forum (amazing the blog has become "traditional"), is most conducive to text, with the advantage of having a far greater capacity for customizing the layout, composition, and presentation of the webpage itself. Blogger allows for a more thought out, curated, and enclosed presentation, in the sense that there are few interlinking media streams where posts are pulled away from the framed context of the page and exhibited in isolation of the original author's lens. While the audience can comment, the original author still has near total control of the content.

Facebook

All the meanwhile Facebook is a torrential media melange allowing for little to no compositional control or curated presentation, yet with the most exposure and highest frequency of feedback from "friends." Media posted to Facebook has the highest chance of being seen within minutes and eliciting feedback. Upon logging in, before a user can reach his own profile he is required to pass by a stream of his "friends'" media, in the form of the newsfeed. The volume of content in the newsfeed is overwhelming, yet I still find myself trying to pay attention to all of the disparate media nuggets like a dog chasing squirrels in the park.

So I will plan on using Facebook to see what people I know are doing with themselves and when I really want a comment on something I've created; Instagram to quickly edit and post photos; Tumblr to browse, collect, and mix images; Blogger for longer, more carefully composed, articles. 

Here are a few Instagram edited photos:

Clark Park, West Philly

 

 Carroll Gardens, N.Y.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms | Video on TED.com

So how do we do this???

Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms | Video on TED.com

Quote: On Writing

From the editors of Tin House Magazine:

". . . a really good piece of writing -- a well-organized, coherent piece with depth, with sentences that show a good understanding of the power of language yet are tightly woven, with no flowery extras -- has a great chance of getting in the magazine." 

And later in the article,

"For such a small insect, cicadas sure show up a lot in poetry and fiction. It sounds silly to take issue with it, but the point is that it smacks of device, which in turn interrupts the dream."

So there you have it -- how to, and how to not, get published in Tin House Magazine.

Retiring the Lesotho Map

Anew

If you have read Utterances before then you know that it now has a new look - a makeover, if you will. 

This new design is the visual manifestation of a shunt to the theme of the blog. For the last two and a half years (Nov. 2008 - Dec. 2011) I was living and working in Lesotho, Southern Africa, as a Peace Corps Education Volunteer. During that time the blog primarily served to document my experiences "on top of the mountain."

I am fortunate to have made a safe return to the States where I am now faced with the daunting and dubious task of finding my place within American society -- a society of the short attention span and personalised technology, of American Idol and Donald Trump, of rest stops and four dollar per gallon gasoline. But also a nation of neighbourhoods and parks. Of coffee and bagels. Of National Public Radio and The New Yorker. Of Obama. Of the Naked Cowboy.

As I undergo this process of re-entry, a foreigner in my own land, the strongest desire I have is to write. I want to express, as the late David Foster Wallace expressed, "What it is to be a fucking human being today."

Let's see . . .

Amazing Street Art

Here is an amazing piece in Berlin . . .