offline consequences (because one’s Facebook ‘friends’ are usually
people one knows offline, whereas many people keep their Tumblr blogs
secret from people they know offline), or YouTube and Instagram, where
the focus on image, branded personality and the ability to monetize one’s
content may make sharing vulnerable information more intimidating, on
Tumblr one can exist merely as words on a screen – a blog could consist
entirely of text posts without images or identifying information except a
URL. Tumblr is comparatively difficult to monetize (those who do tend
to have accounts on separate sites such as Patreon, since one cannot
earn money from advertising revenue or sponsorships as one can on
Instagram) and one’s follower count is not displayed to other users, so
fame on Tumblr has almost no offline value for the vast majority of users.
Therefore, just as YouTube has become the home of many spoken word
and slam poets, Tumblr is the home for many young poets to share
poetry that may be too vulnerable to share elsewhere.
References
Crystal, D. (2011) Internet Linguistics: A Student Guide, First edition, Abingdon:
Routledge.
Smith, C. (2013) ‘Tumblr Offers Advertisers A Major Advantage: Young Users,
Who Spend Tons Of Time On The Site’, Business Insider Online at: https://
www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-and-social-media-demographics-2013-12
[accessed 15 December 2018].
Wordsworth, W. (2012) ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, in Romanticism: An
Anthology, D. Wu (Ed.), fourth edition, Chichester: Blackwell, pp.506–17.
Tumblrs
Jupiter Reed: jupiterreed.tumblr.com
Caleb Lovelace: arckhaic.tumblr.com
Keaton St James: boykeats.tumblr.com
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