"Don't cry for me... I'm already dead."
Those immortal words of Barney Gumble, drunken, gutter-bound, encapsulate this moment.
I've watched this little micro-blogging platform change from a place with a genuine sense of community (if by that I mean a group of people who would routinely get together to take pictures of each other and claim it was hanging out) to a place where people only converse about their obsessive fandom en masse.
Text posts grow cobwebs while animated gifs permeate the spectrum of posts across this long banal digitalized game of telephone that Tumblr has been.
I see a lot of rubbernecking. I see a hell of a lot of impotent rage, backlash, and flat out ignorance disguised as "sticking up for the little guy" or some other cause on this site. I see people making cliques and excluding others in all directions. A quick "tumble" through anyone's dash shows you a decent snapshot of how bland and entitled we are. The experience is damning.
The most damning thing I see however is the lack of READING. I feel like all these neglected text posts are the prime reason this site and the culture it feeds must die. I actually read on a guy's blog a while back this phrase:
"I don't read."
Fuck that, and fuck that guy for saying it. Fuck you even more for not reading. Just thinking this phrase makes my blood boil. Who says they don't read? Not only is it wholly untrue and disingenuous, it is such an awful thing to state so proudly or without embarrassment. If you honestly don't ever read books, comic or otherwise, then you have absolutely NOTHING to say that I have any desire in hearing, and nobody should EVER be forced to listen to you at length or waste a second of their attention on your antics. Reading is how you form your own opinions, develop critical thinking, and challenge yourself with ideas not your own or eaten from the trough that is modern popular culture. If you aren't reading and learning, you're just keeping time while you get old. You can be that 50 year old person who knows just as much as they did when they were 23... which was FUCK ALL.
Age does not equal wisdom. There are plenty of old people who don't know dick about anything. Look at our government leaders for example.
So we have a lot of users threatening to abandon ship from the old U.S.S. Tumblr, and I say great! If it takes a big corporate merger with Yahoo to get you off your computer and out of the comfort zone you live in on this site, where you are never challenged or have to think thoughts you don't want to, then GOOD.
Go.
Read.
Do.
Make.
Having an opinion and sharing that with others is not a bad thing, but to have an opinion means you actually have to think about something for a little longer than it takes to repeat whatever you have read, heard, or seen on TV. It requires a bit of your attention.
I lament for my time, that we only consume garbage and share it with others as though we created it ourselves. Early adoption does not equate to creation. This is a show and tell site. Text is by and large neglected heavily. I feel like using this platform for 4 years or so has made me dumber.
Good riddance!
