Students Share Common Interests on Tumblr

When one logs onto Facebook, he is instantly bombarded with a seemingly endless stream of inconsequential updates from his extended circle of friends. As he scrolls through his newsfeed, he only rarely encounters meaningful information.
 
The blog-hosting site Tumblr, by contrast, allows users to create a stream of information entirely comprised of their central interests. By following bloggers with similar interests and subscribing to tags, Tumblr users can effectively consolidate all of their passions and hobbies into one place—their Tumblr dashboards.
 
Before she created a Tumblr account in 2011, sophomore Letters and Sciences major Catherine Moore frequently posted about her favorite musicians on Facebook.
 
“I used to post all the time on Facebook about how I’m obsessed with [My Chemical Romance] and people would be like, ‘What the hell, calm down,’” she said. “But that’s the norm on Tumblr.”

 
Moore found that people with niche interests flocked to the site to connect with those with mutual tastes.
 
“I am obsessed with Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes and I was Googling him and there was a Tumblr page dedicated to him and I was like, ‘This is so cool,’” she said.
 
In turn, Moore created her own Conor Oberst-themed Tumblr page, on which she posted photos, interviews, songs and news updates about the singer-songwriter. A fellow Oberst blogger, Nichole Leigh, reached out to Moore and suggested that they attempt to procure an interview with Oberst for their Tumblr pages.
 
Although Moore and Leigh were ultimately unable to interview Oberst, the two bloggers arranged a meet-up with other fans on Tumblr at a free Bright Eyes show in Lewiston, N.Y. 
 
“So it turned out to be a way I could meet people and I ended up getting connections to Saddle Creek, [Oberst’s] record label,” Moore said.
 
According to Moore, Tumblr users with a common interest in a given book, movie or band form “fandoms,” or figurative Tumblr communities that share mutual jokes and memes.
 
“Fandoms always have their own inside jokes,” she said. “Pretty much if you’re not in the fandom you’ll look at them and be like, ‘These people are weird and stupid’ but when you’re inside it you obsess over it together.”
 
Junior English major Ashley Delaney uses her Tumblr page to connect with other bloggers who share her infatuation with various TV shows and books, like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and the “Hunger Games” book series and movie franchise. She cites tagging as an ideal tool to find users that are interested in similar content.
 
“You can put tags in your post so that people will then look up the tag and they’ll find it,” Delaney said.
 
Moore claims that she acquired the more than 2,000 followers on her Conor Oberst blog mostly due to tagging and reblogging.

 
“I would tag everything as like ‘Bright Eyes,’ ‘Conor Oberst,’ and people would find that and then just follow me from there,” she said. “And then people can reblog you. And if they see that you’re the source they can find you through that too.”
 
In addition to using Tumblr as a means of participating in the fandom culture, some bloggers use it to post their own original art. Freshman dance and kinesiology major Nicole Turchi originally created a Tumblr page to share her photography.
 
“[Tumblr] is sort of like an artistic place,” she said. “You know, people are like, ‘It’s for artsy-fartsy hipsters,’ but it’s kind of true.”
 
At present, Turchi uses Tumblr to cultivate her artistic interests. She follows dance and photography blogs, and reblogs whatever she finds “aesthetically pleasing.”
 
She also occasionally uses Tumblr as a channel through which to vent her personal feelings, posting “quick snippets” of what she is thinking.
 
“The fact that there’s that sense of anonymity in there, people will just share things on Tumblr that you just wouldn’t see on Facebook … It’s a sort of way to express yourself without feeling like you’re telling your friends in a way too,” Turchi said. 
 
Although Turchi admits Tumblr’s layout can initially be confusing for new users, she contends that the site is worth giving a try.
 
“It’s like any sort of social networking site … [there is] a whole new language,” she said. “Eventually you’re like, ‘Wait, this makes sense. I kind of love it.’”
 
Nonetheless, Turchi warns that surfing Tumblr for hours on end can easily become an unshakeable addiction.
 
“When you get into it, you get into it … Tumblr is like completely infinite,” she said. “I could honestly be on it for hours at a time.”