Ok well I had a whole thing written out and then it didn't save to drafts - so here's my ramble 2.0. It took me like a month to get back to you, but this has turned out to be many paragraphs. So enjoy!
I'm an anthropology major, and my focus has been on linguistic and cultural anthropology (as opposed to like, biological or medical or archeological). Something that I find really neat in this area is the way that people online use tools like punctuation, spacing, grammar, capitalization, even images to substitute for the communication lost with the lack of in-person tools like gestures, body language, rhythm or speed, facial expressions, and tone. Obviously this is a phenomenon that has always existed in writing - that's why punctuation exists - but there's something fascinating to me about the way that standards for how to read these unique forms of expression are created, especially when comparing social media platforms, because the functions and limitations of each one lead to slightly different "cultures" of communication.
So for my thesis I decided to look more into this - there is a lot of research about the internet and social media, but at least I haven't seen any that does it through the lens of internet behavior and expression as like a form of linguistic translation. On a bigger picture scale, I'm interested in looking at social media and internet communities through the lens of in-person ones. How are more traditional methods of studying and analyzing groups and group behavior successful or unsuccessful on accurately portraying our social behavior on the internet? I also decided to use Tumblr, because I know how to navigate it best and it's more archival nature lends itself better to the collection of internet posts as data points for someone who has no experience in collecting that sort of thing lol. I got lucky too, they updated their search function just as I was starting to more formally put what I wanted to do together!
I am now putting a read more for politeness - a Tumblr social etiquette behavior!!!
I'm still in the "putting together the proposal" stage, so right now my research questions are as follows:
How is culture/are cultural norms developed in online contexts?
How do Tumblr users utilize the platform’s features to perpetuate a set of norms and behaviors?
How do Tumblr users employ platform-specific entextualization to signal their belonging to the culture of the platform?
How do Tumblr users apply metaphors of territory to their relationship to the platform?
How do Tumblr users relate their sense of belonging to their online communities to forms of belonging and space that they experience outside of the digital world?
My plan is to look at a couple different things. First, just general popular posts, as examples of what is self-referenced on the platform and how perpetuating the history of the site contributes to its culture and is itself a cultural behavior. Second, posts that talk about Tumblr or Tumblr culture themselves - so not only, what is user behavior like, but what do users think user behavior is like? What is classified as good or bad user behavior? And to find a good sample of all of these, my plan right now is to look at posts from what I'm calling "site-wide events"; so, Goncharov, the Porn Ban, the big Twitter Migration when Elon Musk bought the platform (perhaps in comparison to how we reacted to Reddit Refugees). And then I've been tagging posts as "thesis relevant" just in case I want to use them.
Things I've also started looking at are like, the way users sometimes "play" at doing Tumblr (like during Goncharov) and what that says about their conceptions of Standard Tumblr Behavior, or they way we (and also internet users in general in my experience) use "territorial" language to think about platforms ("Refugees", "migration", etc).
"Rent-lowering gunshots" is actually a pretty good springboard to talk about all of this. First of all, the actual language of it is referring to the platform as a dwelling, or in context of the original I think Tweet, a neighborhood. Also brings with it comparisons of like, the fear of the platform being corporatized (like, become unmarketable) and the process of gentrification. Second, it's a reference to a popular post that has transformed to refer to a specific behavior or phenomenon, which is a very social media form of entextualization, and especially a very Tumblr form of it. Third, the behavior itself falls into the category of what I would call "playing" at doing Tumblr - people reveal what their conception of standard Tumblr behavior is by making posts that use those behaviors and forms of expression and references to the maximum extent, AND, specifically as a way of signaling belonging to this specific platform and not another one (ie Twitter), and reinforcing in-group/out-group behavior and conceptions (not in like a horrible way, just in a human behavior way lol) - if you can't handle this behavior then you don't belong in this space and with this culture.
So yeah anyway next steps are over the summer I want to organize the posts I've tagged into a spreadsheet, actually read and take notes on a bunch of relevant papers I have pulled up (did you know there's a whole book about Tumblr research???), and decide on a minimum number of notes I want a post to have in order to consider it a data point, so I actually have some parameters lol.
If you've read all this, thanks! Also thanks for asking me, this has been good practice at actually communicating and putting together all my thoughts about this before I submit my proposal to a bunch of adulty adults ^-^
PS ok I got so scared my computer died just as I finished this but it's all still here yay!! Thanks for giving me the chance to ramble, ask again if you have any follow-up questions!!
Don't question Mandeville's views on economics too much btw... all you need to know is he was a massive classics nerd who named his daughter Penelope & that Ben Franklin met him once and thought he was fun and cool
