notes.husk.org/likes images.

tomewing:

shabogangraffiti:

philsandifer:

shabogangraffiti:

philsandifer:

shabogangraffiti:

fandomsandfeminism:

amydentata:

southern-feminism:

Inclusive children go far.

Kids are too smart for this school crap.

I would give that kid so many bonus points. 100% A+

The master learns from the student.  We can hope, anyway.

I mean, I’d like the kid more if they didn’t immediately go from “disabled people exist” to focusing exclusively on veterans.

Yes. I am complaining that a fourth grader is insufficiently inclusive in his social justice rhetoric. This is Tumblr, and I won’t even make the day’s top ten list of “excessive demands for ideological purity” with this effort.

It’s an interesting question actually - how did tumblr get to have (or get to be perceived to have) this specific identity as a haven of SJWs?  Particularly when one tag search for anything non-PC you can imagine shows you just how ideologically pure it really is.

Because while it has a wealth of conservative fuckery, it is also the social media apparatus that young social justice activists have embraced, and they’re frankly what provides a lot of its energy. Tumblr’s reputation and brand is “activists, porn, and the ability to reconstruct an entire episode of Doctor Who from gifsets within twenty-four hours of it airing.”

Actually, I should say, reconstruct an entire episode such that every single line is accompanied with either social justice commentary about how misogynistic it is or an erotic fanfic using that line as a springboard.

Yes, it has racists too. And hashtags. Really, it has all the normal features of a social network, along with activists, porn, and a lingering sense that there’s no excuse for Loose Canon taking months to reconstruct an episode of Doctor Who.

Yeah, but why?  How did that happen?

Anthropologist Mimi Ito says social networks are either “communities of friendship” or “communities of interest” - Facebook is the obvious example of the former. Tumblr is the latter. Communities of interest tend to be characterised by loose groupings of people who don’t necessarily know one another through real life and share (duh) interests.

“Interests” obviously can include social justice issues, as well as fandom, fetishes, and other stuff well represented on Tumblr. But fandom and porn are very visual interests, which fits tumblr’s interface and style. Why social justice?

Some of it’s just luck - social justice was a niche not being filled by the other big community-of-interest networks (eg 4chan, digg as was, Reddit, though Reddit’s rise is parallel). Tumblr was also helped by a big shift of fandom users from LiveJournal, once LJ started getting restrictive and creepy. GENERALISATION ALERT: teenagers on LJ in the 00s hitting college-age on Tumblr in the 10s are also likely to be getting more into politics, social justice issues, and to have the confidence and voice to express themselves. Or that’s my genealogical theory, anyhow.

Other factors - interest networks tend to downplay real names, which is important in situations where you may be testifying personally about stuff that affected you or expressing opinions that your friends/family would disapprove of.

Tumblr makes it super-easy to start multiple blogs, meaning you can set up a vertical on a specific topic very rapidly - which makes activism easier to focus. (Ditto fandom. And porn.)

And Tumblr is - unlike Reddit or Digg - a less overtly hierarchical social network - your follow/follower counts aren’t visible. This matters a lot, as anyone familiar with how arguments play out on Twitter will realise! The kind of competitive bean-counting hierarchical social nets encourage may be less attractive to social justice types.

Phew - those are my hypotheses, anyhow!

I know there’s a lot, but read all of this because it goes to a very interesting place.