Improbable Curators: Analysing Nostalgia, Authorship and Audience on Tumblr Microblogs

Abstract

Launched in 2007 and hosting around 280 million blogs as of February 2016, Tumblr¹ is one of the most popular yet under-researched microblogging platforms currently in existence. Having established itself as a premier venue of online popular and youth culture (Dewey, 2015), the service provides an idiosyncratic synesthetic space wherein countless visual and stylistic statements are shared daily, ranging from digital images to literary excerpts, journal entries to animations. The absence of subordinating vertical structures (there exists no real ‘mainstream’ vs. ‘underground’ dynamic here), the possibility of interpreting the blogs both as niche and micro youth media (see Thornton, 1995,