Okay after about two months of experience with Tumblr, I have to make my judgment.
Reddit and Tumblr are both equally addicting, but something about Tumblr just butters that up by so much. It’s much more personal. You have friends reblogging and expressing their interests and thoughts. Friends are like-minded people, so you would have some of the same interests as them. That’s brilliant! You follow other blogs that you find interest in, and, like that, we have a living and breathing ecosystem of like-minded individuals.
Reddit may be heroin of the internet, but Tumblr is definitely the feel-good feeling. Reddit is a big extended family that ranges across different subjects. Each sub-reddit is a different family of people. You have the circlejerking sensationalist atheists in r/atheism and the die-hard Christians in r/christianity. Both sub-reddits are filled with life and differing opinions. But what makes reddit amazing is that you have the choice to be a part of a multitude of communities. You don’t even have to engage. It’s a aggregate of your favorite subjects. Lovely!
At the end of the day, both sites are lovely. I can immerse myself with like-minded people and communities that share the same general interests as me. I can laugh my butt off on both sites, I can cry at both sites, I can share ideas and receive feed back on both sites, and definitely never regret wasting my time on both sites.
It’s still a better love story than Twilight. /end
The way we communicate with each other has effectively evolved over these past few years. Entrepreneurs spawned great ideas and turned them into start ups. These start ups eventually turned into Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Android, reddit, Tumblr, and even independent games like Minecraft.
It’s quite magical to see ideas blossom into a living, growing, adapting community. These communities define how we share information in the twenty-first century. Y2K may not have predicted the end-of-the-world, but it predicted the end of something: the archaic information highway. People no longer send letter or call each other’s house phone because we’ve replaced these obsolete methods with email, instant messaging, and texting.
It’s quite spectacular actually, since people aren’t very inclined to change, or adapt. But it comes at no surprise that Generation X and Y are the one’s at the helm of change. Generation X and Y have the internet and were the first generation to experience functional phones. I still remember my first phone. It was a small Nokia phone that ran on Cingular. It was indestructible. Though when I first received the phone, it was nothing more than an emergency contact. The years went by and texting became more and more prominent. The rise of texting is rooted deeply in two factors I call active and passive communication.
We absolutely love active and passive communication simultaneously. Active communication happens when there is constant ping-pong flurry of conversation. We can imagine this as I’m texting a friend and within minutes, or even seconds, receive a response as if they were talking to me directly.
If we think about it, passive communication is also quite lucrative. What I mean by passive communication is the act of sending a message when the other party isn’t necessarily there. This happens when I send an email or text and expect a response when they see the message. An example of this would be sending offline messages or questions on Tumblr. You don’t expect a response right away, you expect a response at a later time.
Texting utilizes both forms of communication in a simple manner. It’s a ping pong game. We send a message, the ping, and we receive a response, the pong. You may have heard of the technical terms ping and lag before. This is where it originated from. The time it takes for one session for a ping and a pong to occur is the ping. Lag is just an arbitrary term that defines a long interval between the ping and the pong.
Okay, I got off tangent. Let’s back to the focus of this message: Sharing. People share things differently now. It’s become easy. When we find a funny or interesting video, we share it through texting, tumblr, reddit, twitter, or facebook. We have a multitude of facets to place our content.
Artists have a blank canvas and an audience with an insatiable desire for more. We, as an audience, crave originality, humor, and sympathy. However, we’re missing a critical aspect of it all. How do we critique submissions? There has to be a measure of love and hate. Facebook has it, and so does YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit.
Can you recognize and list the measure?
Facebook - Likes and Shares
YouTube - Favorites, Likes, Dislikes
Twitter - Favorites, Retweets
Reddit - Up and Down votes
Tumblr - Reblogs and Likes (Collectively known as Notes)
Why do these sites have them? It’s because it’s absolutely critical for these outlets to sustain a form of feedback. Because without it, there is no measure of love and hate.
This is how the internet thrives. We have a voice. We can be original. We can be very supah famous. We can be unique. But above all, we can be human.
