Basically I can’t reblog pretty much anyone I’m not following. This has helped me realize just how much I don’t care, so, that’s the end of the story. I’m not going to dramatically re-expand my following list though, my d’board is long enough as it is.Tumblr staff, if you happen to read this (ha), encouraging people to spend all their time on your site is going to backfire. Folks need to be creative and actually do stuff of interest to seed the site. This creeping no-reblog-unless-following policy and the apparent behavior of the tumblarity algorithm is going to turn the site into a circle jerk, where everyone spends all of their time trying to keep up with their dashboard, reblogging, or posting BS rather than doing something actually of interest. Some can argue that it was that way from the beginning, but I don’t necessarily agree.
This. I’m under the sneaking suspicion as I delve further into the concept of “social networking” that people are spending more time consuming and regurgitating content, instead of creating content — hell, creating anything.
And it is one big circle jerk… how in god’s name are you supposed to have a life if you’re following Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Tumblr, Gawker, Fark, etc, etc. never mind the private forums you might frequent? And on a lot of sites, like Tumblr, apparently, this reblogging and liking and digging etc is a competition, and people take it quite seriously, to the point that this is their “claim to fame” on the internet.
Jung’s collective unconscious, our internal, ancestral “reservoir of the experiences of our species” is being sapped, and depending on one’s perspective, it is either evolving or deterioriating into a collective Metameme.
Hook a video monitor to a video camera and point the camera at that monitor, and you’ll see what I mean. An eternal looping of… nothingness.
I’m stepping away from this part of the internets for awhile. I need to concentrate on creation, and not consumption, before my brain fries like J. Frank Parnell.
“One day my mind was full to bursting. The next day - nothing. Swept away. But I’ll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.”
