A Bit More Detail

Something about the way I sank into the chair and yawning last night around 8 o'clock caused my to pop my my right temporomandibular joint, since it has caused me a lot of hassle. First I had to call Telehealth to be sure and get told that I should check it one, then I had to go to a walk-in clinic downtown to be told that I should see my dentist, then I walk down the street to my dentist and make an appointment for a week's time, then I have to go home with the strong suggestion that I should rest the jaw for the next bit, this rest including no "jaw jaw jaw." This unpleasantness, along with the strong desire to keep my dull pain from becoming actual shooting pain never mind wake-up-screaming-in-the-night pain, means that a pleasant night based on oral communication isn't going to be. Tabernac.

What will I do instead? Electronic communication will suffice nicely for the next bit, which works out since I wanted to write a blog post that began with Tumblr. A microblogging site like Twitter that includes an ability to readily share photos and video, this social networking service got some coverage recently in the free daily TTC-ubiquitous Metro, "Ups and Downs of a Tumblette's Life". "Tumblette."

Canadian Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother (a.k.a jaimeleigh) is supposedly a Tumblette: young, sexy and an over-sharer. The Tumblette — a vogue-ish tag for a female type who blogs on the website Tumblr — “lifecasts” with an edge.

[. . . ]

On her “for the story goes” Tumblr, the Toronto-based Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother bares all daily — from a series of self-point-and-shoot photos the 20-something blond snapped for a Semi-Naked-Picture-Day, to a controversial posting that included a spreadsheet mapping her bed-hopping history.

“People have a weird love for these sexual things,” says Fairbrother, who in person, is surprisingly demure. “We all talk about it... yet if you’re honest and shameless about it, you’re judged.”

At first glance, Fairbrother’s Tumblr is a female version of Tucker Max, whose drunken bro-ish hijinks recently made it to the big screen in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

It’s made Fairbrother a love-her-or-hate-her Tumblette: She’s garnered a cult of 800 to 900 active followers and, last week, was ranking higher than other micro-celebrities and fellow oversharers, like Internet star Julia Allison.

Fairbrother’s quick to recognize her Tumblr began over a year ago as a lonely, soliloquy-ing stream.

Her postings quickly garnered followers, especially through Tumblr’s unique re-blogging feature — the re-posting of content allows users to trace how one post is amplified or subverted by other users — which created a dialogue that would bounce between her, her followers and even non-followers.

(Jamie-Leigh's Tumblr blog is here. I like.)

Many of the Tumblr elements described above--the ability to share and reshare links, the ability to construct communities of readers, and so on--have been active functions of any number of blogging platforms and social networking systems for years. boasts about the Telegraph that "the smart thing to be doing online these days is tumblelogging, which is to weblogs what text messages are to email - short, to the point, and direct."

What interested me most about the article apart from its content was the way it positioned a certain demographic as core, 20-something women who are quite active and often very open online. This sort of association with an online social networking service with a stereotype isn't unfamiliar, and may not even be inaccurate, since social networks are famously lumpy. We're familiar with how MySpace is especially common among musicians and certain American socioeconomic classes, how Orkut surprisingly came to dominate the Brazilian and take off in absolute numbers in India, how English Canada went Facebook-mad long before French Canada, the networks which ensure LinkedIn is populated very largely by professionals and professional-wannabes, and, closer to home, the way that Livejournal is famously big among Russophones. My own blog presence is based on Livejournal since that's the platform where my friends and acquaintances were, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't the sort of thing that influenced all my readers at some point. One may as well be amazed that Flickr's users use that service to store and reproduce images.

Some stereotypes are accurate, even useful. Others, not so much. The use of the diminuitive "ette" to describe hard-core users of Tumblr struck me as interesting, inasmuch as "ette" is one of those terms that is either sexist or reclaimed from sexism. The latter is the one that applies here, but real stigma is elsewhere. I think particularly about how some talk about Livejournal as an embarrassing wasteland populated by whiny teenagers. While I was flattered when one blogger years ago cited A Bit More Detail as one of the few good things on Livejournal, I was not impressed even more by the insult paid to the hundreds of Livejournal users who are as interesting bloggers as anyone. Are Blogspot and Typepad really that much better? This prejudice has even been internalized: the maintainers of the very interesting russiamagazine community preface most of their posts by saying that the "Russian blogosphere conveniently, if bafflingly, revolves around LJ."

I don't like this prejudice. Negative stereotypes are always bad, especially the sweeping ones, never mind how these particular ones discourage some from taking full ("Why use Livejournal if people won't take me seriously?") and lead others to ignorantly reject huge, perfectly enjoyable, swathes of our great global online community. It's inevitable that the prejudice that infects humanity generally would manifest itself in this specific form, I suppose, and the sheer size of the online community makes picking-and-choosing inevitable regardless of the motives involved, too, but I still feel let down. What happened to the dreams of unfettered global community? More, was wanting to believe in them really inevitable?