#meta-

[94monkeys]

As if I didn’t have enough to do, Tumblr, now I’m also in an a cappella group?

[94monkeys]

This rumor about having to post with the word “reply” in it in order to get replies again...

ETA: Seems like just a rumor. Too bad. I too want to reply to all the posts! 

[94monkeys]

I am the 5%

I already did take the Tumblr marketing survey about replies and would encourage you to do so, especially now that the post sharing it has been deleted. (The Internet never forgets.) That said... 

I’m on a webinar about Tumblr for work (my life is weird) (no, we don’t actually have a work Tumblr) and Emilie Lara from Media Partnerships said that 72 million posts a day go up on the site, and 95% of those are reblogs. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT. I would never have guessed based on my dash that it was that high, but it is, and it seems from this presentation that that is how Tumblr wants it to be. 

As you might remember, there was never a reply option on reblogs, so the posts that COULD have replies turned on are... quick math... 3,600,000 posts a day. Obviously a minority of posts, but sounds like more than “a couple thousand blogs” affected, @staff​ @david​. I’d really love to see how they came up with that estimate (but I know I never will).  As a person who rarely reblogs, I guess I don’t use the platform the way it is supposed to be used, shucks. But Tumblr leadership wants people to reblog more (because, and this is my speculation, that generates more posts, to show that the site is growing for Yahoo as it tries to sell itself off). 

As an end user clearly I think it’s crappy as a lot of you do, and knowing that it wasn’t personal is not much of a balm. I am a late-departer from social platforms (for pete’s sake, I still have a Blogger account) so I don’t know what I will do. (Anyone want to start a joint Wordpress? Not sure these scrabblings merit their own platform.) 

[94monkeys]

Just read the schedule. It is a marvel. So many overlapping fandoms.

[ariadna502]

al final...

Forswearing revenge is an institutional action, without a doubt. In that sense, it is a methodological condition for reconciliation. It is also a logic of action and inter-action that forges new structures of recognition as it resets the scene of address in which subjects are addressed as such, in which dissent and demands are neither countered nor furthered by violence, physical or symbolic. In this sense, it is a substantive condition for reconciliation. We can agree with Schaap when he says that reconciliation starts with a breaking point, a moment in which history is interrupted in order to change its course. It is also a matter of the community, namely, of posing the question of what kind of community we want to be, stressing the fact that neither the ‘what’ nor the ‘we’ in that question have been previously defined. It is, in that sense, a highly Arendtian form of political action, in which spontaneity and newness are put forth as the highest expression of action: the constitution of a community and new ties of civility in exceptional, unpredictable ways. But for this to reach the extent it needs to have an actual effect on the constitution of a community, its transformative potential should reach the social as well as political status quo. Because, even if ‘politically’ we can imagine a new community, we also need to set the social conditions under which its coming into being is effectively enabled. Thus, we need to criticize Arendt’s conception of the social to acknowledge that sociality is not only about ‘nation-wide housekeeping’, about a normalizing force of life. Rather, it is the tether that brings together and sets apart, it is recognition and the scene of address that legitimizes subjects before politics is even discussed. Thus, a transformation of this scene of address in Colombia would bring new forms of sociality, it would transform the need for revenge and retribution in order to think of a community that has left behind fifty years of violent conflict. How this community might look like, though, cannot be determined in advance. It would be, perhaps, the work of people that, very much like artists do, put themselves to the task of imagining what will become of them without the order of violence.

[ariadna502]

In a real sense, we do not survive without being addressed, which means that the scene of address can and should provide sustaining condition for ethical deliberation, judgement and conduct. in the same way, I would argue, the institutions of punishment and imprisonment have a responsibility to sustain the very lives that enter their domains, precisely because they have the power, in the name of "ethics", to damage and destroy lives with impunity. If, as Spinoza maintained, one can desire to live life in the right way only if there is, already or at the same time, a desire to live, it would seem equally true that the scenario of punishment that seeks to transform the desire for life into a desire for death erodes the condition of ethics itself.

- Giving and Account of Oneself, Judith Butler.

[ariadna502]

The sociologist who begins a history of social theories is at once very tempted to stop. To write such a history, he has first to decide what social theories are. If he suggests a sociological answer, he both presupposes the validity of what he is trying to explain and undermines his claim to have taken a decision at all. If he suggests another, he seems oddly to exempt himself and his subjects from the determinations he claims to detect in others. He is caught between circularity, self-cancellation and bad faith. This is a history written in bad faith. It accepts that sociologists have asked important questions. It doubts that they have so far provided very good answers. And this distance between question and answer is nowhere greater than on the issue of what social theories themselves are. None of the existing answers to this question will do, although why they will not makes it clear what might.

- Enlightenment & Despair, Geoffrey Hawthorn.