Programming note.
Tumblr is, I think, becoming more and more like a hostage house, a sealed-off cult compound, where my messages to the outside world are becoming more and more incomprehensible. Do you get that sense?
It is difficult, using this particular blogging platform, to remember that you are essentially writing for two audiences: Tumblr people internally who are reading this through their dashboards, and everyone else, who is reading this through an RSS feed, or who has it bookmarked, or who has stumbled across it performing Internet searches for “is brunch a classy date”. [A: yes, always]
I have achieved parity, roughly, in internal Tumblr readers and external readers, if my Google Analytics is to be believed. I have done what I think is a very good job avoiding mentioning all the weird cultish things that go on inside this hostage house, this compound, weird cultish things such as “likes” and “followers” for the benefit of external readers. To this list I must now sadly add “tumblarity,” which is not even a word.
I fear, as many of you may, that someday it will arrive at the point where a “tumblelog” is so inside-baseball, so inwardly gazing and reblog-reliant and Twitterish and social media-heavy and tumbularitular (or whatever the adjective form of the word “tumblarity” is) that it becomes completely worthless to the non-Tumblr world.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but it seems possible. But then again, there are so many tumblelogs out there that ignore the cultish internal goings-on and hum along with original content, strong writing or singular focus just beautifully…
