The New Who Thing - Khoi Vinh

My biggest complaint, by far, has bothered me for some time but has taken me only until recently to put my finger on. Tumblr discourages identity. Or, to be more specific, it promotes shallow identity. Moreso than other blogging systems like WordPress or ExpressionEngine, Tumblr blogs frequently offer only scant few details about their authors. I can’t recall how many Tumblr sites I’ve visited where it wasn’t clear who was behind the posts, what their background was, or what their intent was. Many of these sites are artful, well designed and are actually quite engaging, but I guess I’m old fashioned in that I like to know who’s behind them.

WHO DID THIS?

Everyone praises the power of anonymity that the Internet makes possible, and I’m firmly in that camp. At the same time, I prefer it when people use their real identities. It just makes for a better experience. When you post or contribute anything online and you use your real name, and you provide authentic details about your station in life or your passions, it works as a multiplier of the value of your contribution — and for the richness of the network, too.

That’s what was so compelling, I think, about the first few waves of blogs. By and large, they weren’t just venues for the publication of content. They also served as outposts for your identity, a representation of who you were on the World Wide Web. By contrast, Tumblr blogs often seem more like something dishonest — well, dishonest is too strong a word. But when I browse through many of these tumblelogs, they feel as if their authors are trying to get away with something, trying to sneak something past somebody. There’s a sense of evasiveness, or vagueness, of no one really standing behind what’s been published, or no one being sufficiently committed to the content to offer up their name.

Before readers here post vociferous defenses of this approach, let me clear, I don’t think that Tumblr’s dynamic of shallow identity is wrong. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, the highly fungible nature of identity that Tumblr makes possible is a welcome ballast against the deeper identity dynamic that Facebook makes possible — or that Facebook makes inevitable, depending on how you look at it. The Tumblr approach is much more tolerant of ambiguity, of irony and artfulness, and that’s a good thing. I only wish that particular quality was also a bit more conducive to its users putting forward their real identities. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m still not jealous as heck I didn’t come up with the whole thing.

Vinh falls into the Zuckerberg Fallacy, arguing that Tumblr promotes ‘shallow’ identity, where users’ ‘real’ identities are absent, and only fragmentary details may be available.

But if a person is exploring a single node of their networked identity in a Tumblr blog — for example, a foot fetish, or an obsession with piercings — the experience for the poster or the reader is changed drastically by the imposition of a ‘real’ — meaning monolithic — personality. 

And the nature of the blog’s material may be in conflict with other nodes in the networked identity, or cause conflict by bringing together contacts in non-overlapping contexts.