Reblogging Fashion : Participatory curation on Tumblr

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the aesthetic quality, visual experience and social practice of the microblog platform Tumblr. Having passed the 100 million blogs mark, the service has been increasingly prominent online since its launch in 2007. Thus, fashion, mass media and memory institutions as well as other more individual forms of visual expression have found the platform particularity interesting as a source for communication and networking. Disputing Jodi Dean’s argument that blogging is an expression of our constantly shifting identities and provoking us to exhibitionism, this article proposes blogging and reblogging on Tumblr as a type of creative curation where digital images and content are in constant flux but always temporarily fixed through the reblog button, re-creating through different contexts and part of identity formations, rather than effects of them. Moreover, fashion is crucial in understanding Tumblr’s appeal, not just by way of the style blogs and fashion focus of the site and the ambiguities of its execution, but also in the very force, which drives the blogging in the first place, a desire or addictive yearning. The platform is arguably unique in providing active user participation through anonymity, dialogue, and alternative spaces for interaction and community with a mixture of attention, production and expression, making Tumblr a central case for the future of content curation online.

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