The content ranged from stills from indie or art films I had never seen to hand-drawn fan art of musicians or bands, to outfit pics from random girls like me to moody teenage poetry in the form of a text post. It drew from the past, from art history, from subcultures gone by, and from the brains of my contemporaries. It was there to delight and to distract, just like any form of entertainment, but it also sparked curiosity.
Via @kyraa.rx
My feed inspired me to go to my local independent movie theater to watch Baby Face, a 1933 Barbra Stanwyck film, simply because I had seen a GIF from it online. It inspired me to make a trip to The Art Institute to see that Edward Hopper painting I had reblogged, but up close. I wrote bad poetry in my school composition notebook, knowing that there was a place for it somewhere online. Tumblr was an easy way into the world for the arts at large, a way to define my taste and to learn about art and the people who made it. If you grew up in a place where you didn’t have access to that kind of thing in real life, then the online cultural space of Tumblr was even more important. It was personal, it was localized, it was self-curated, and most importantly, it was over once I closed my laptop.
Even though social media gave us access to things outside of what would have otherwise been our sphere, it served as an avenue for exploration and allowed space for inspiration rather than simply serving as a distraction from our lives.
The average experience of using TikTok feels a little different. It follows you everywhere, from your couch to the subway to the breakroom at work. It requires completely absorbed attention, both audio and visual, and it moves at a breakneck speed that only gets faster as our brains become more trained to its pace. It doesn’t quite matter who you follow, the “For You” page will show you what some supercomputer thinks you want to see. The mysterious algorithm (whose methods can really only be deduced from reverse engineering) hones in on what kinds of videos you linger on and tries to show you more of that. The result is a highly addictive stream of short-form video content that lulls you into a state of half-consciousness. At least it does for me. Inspiration rarely strikes on TikTok, only an emotional state that’s half agitating and half lobotomizing, the perfect mixture to get you to keep scrolling.
I’m also not a teenager anymore. I’m less prone to the types of self-construction that social media can foster. Maybe the teens of today are reaching into TikTok and finding gems-- videos that inspire them to write songs, to find new bands, to engage in the arts in their own communities. Heck, TikTok introduced a generation to Kate Bush after “Running Up That Hill” went mega-viral in 2022. (Though that was really thanks to its appearance in Stranger Things, a popular TV show made by millennials.) Maybe TikTok is opening the worlds of the 58% of American teens who use it daily. I have a feeling, though, that it's not so easy for them to tear themselves away from the screen in order to do so.
Via @sadesgrave
Imagining a world in which the tech giants who run these platforms return to hand-curated algorithms rather than top-down content feeds is a futile project. These social media companies have a firmer grip on us than ever, and letting any of that go would be going against the advice of every business textbook. If they have our attention, they have our dollars, and these companies are wildly successful at what they do. We’re learning, though, that what they do is at odds with our well-being as humans, especially teenage humans.
In 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars in cash. In 2019, Verizon (Yahoo’s parent company) sold Tumblr for reportedly less than 3 million dollars. In the sink-or-swim game of honing algorithms for monetization, it sank.
Tumblr was far from perfect. It turns out niche groups can create niche drama, and cyberbullying will happen anywhere teens can talk to each other online. Not to mention its circulation of potentially dangerous subject matter among its young viewers. Did I need to see that many gifs of Cassie from Skins talking about her eating disorder? Probably not. Social media is social media, and it’s going to create a false reality that could end up harming us. To me, though, the positives outweighed the negatives, at least in my vision of the past. I still go to shows of the bands I found on Tumblr. I studied film in college, partly thanks to the movies it helped me find. But I can easily envision a world when the teens of 2035 yearn for the TikTok of 2025, back when you could turn your phone off, and it wasn’t implanted in your retina… or something. Nostalgia is not the most useful emotion, but it does help us think about what we’d change in our present. So maybe I’ll log back into my Tumblr. Or maybe I’ll just make a TikTok set to an Arctic Monkeys song, and that will feel just as good.