tumblr resurrection

Back in February my tumblr account was terminated and I couldn't be bothered to start over again, but with all the things happening at twitter now, I was intrigued to hear on Wednesday that tumblr has - after nearly four years - given up on banning female presenting nipples. I thought that sounded like a step in the right direction, so I launched a new attempt, this time as prose2passion.

I'm also using Mastodon more regularly in an attempt to be better connected there when twitter collapses. It's amazing how much more activity I've seen on Mastodon since Musk carried that sink into twitter HQ. Still haven't tried pinterest.

I even tried to log into my old MySpace account but failed (even though I am quite sure I have the correct login details). Maybe they block logins that haven't been used for ten years.

my new profile pic on tumblr (dates from 2019 though). Am likely to keep the bookish theme there, so this seemed to fit. The book is A diagonal dos tolos by Santiago Lopo.

rip tumblr

From 2011 to the notorious ban of "female-presenting nipples" in December 2018 I had been a very happy user of tumblr, and learned a lot from people I met there. After the ban, the inquisition hid my main blog, proseandpassion, and I felt the site going rapidly downhill as the ban deterred the more artistic providers of NSFW content, but not those people who just dumped stolen porn at industrial scale.

When Covid-19 hit, I gave it another go with prosepluspassion, and even moved my daily science news there, but since the beginning of this year I noticed that people were disappearing at an alarming rate. Now I know why - tumblr closed my account without warning. I can't be bothered to start over again, so will look out for alternatives. Maybe Pinterest - I notice they haven't been bought up by facebook yet.

While I am still keeping my facebook account, I am not prepared to sign up for Instagram while it is under their rule (on this issue see this comment by Cory Doctorow). But otherwise I'm open to suggestions. Does anybody use Mastodon these days? Pillowfort? (suggestions of non-censoring sites I found here).

Happy days - a screenshot taken in anticipation of the 2000th follower. Never had quite as many on any other platform.

Some of my tumblr content rescued to 2mblr just after the ban is still online here, surprisingly. There is also a 2mblr backup of StreetMusicOxford. As far as I know, 2mblr never functioned as a live social network though. I can "follow" people and look at their blogs, but there's no timeline and I haven't seen anything more recent than May 2019. Finding people to follow is a bit tricky, but each time I open the search page I get a different set of 12 suggestions, so that's a start.

What is really weird though is that when I go to one of my posts which include content I uploaded to tumblr (as opposed to the more numerous ones just reblogged as they were swilling around), and click on image link, I get a tumblr link to my image and that still works. So tumblr haven't deleted my stuff they're just hiding it. Naughty people.

Random example:

Post on 2mblr

image link

science news on the move

I started archiving the science news items here in January 2019 after tumblr started to hide my blog (which is also called proseandpassion), following the change to its censorship approach.

Recently, however, there have been days when blogger wasn't working when I needed it for the science news archive. As I have now started a new tumblr blog, which hasn't been hidden yet (prosepluspassion.tumblr.com), I'm now trying to move the science news back there, i.e. in addition to tweeting each item, I will also share it on tumblr with the tag "science" (plus up to four other tags for specific fields), so it should show up at https://prosepluspassion.tumblr.com/tagged/science.

You can access these pages without having an account with tumblr, just like any other blog. (If you do have an account, you can reblog them like you retweet things on twitter.) Seems to be working fine so far but let me know if there are any problems.

All other content that isn't strictly time sensitive, such as features, book reviews, etc remains here (and may be mirrored on tumblr if I remember to post the link). For these items it doesn't matter too much if the site isn't working one day and I have to post it the next.

the lost world of tumblr

Eight months after the Great Tumblr Purge, the site appears to be going the way of MySpace now. Press reports of its sale to the owners of WordPress this week suggested the price tag was just $3 million, down by a factor of 300 on what Verizon paid for it just two years ago. Which reminds us, again, of MySpace in the doomed tenure of Murdoch's empire.

Here is a very detailed article in El Mundo which cites the $3 million price as a fact, while the Guardian calls it unconfirmed.

(UPDATE 21.8. I like this analysis asking: Could WordPress + Tumblr create an alternative to Facebook? which would be good but I'm not terribly optimistic.)

Since the purge, I have made it a habit to log into tumblr just once a week to inspect the damage. The situation is very much as it was in January - the art has gone, much of the porn is still there. Clearly censorship has done a brilliant job at blowing this up.



Screenshot of my tumblr archive when I still had one (mid Dec 2018). At that time, I shared a bit more NSFW content than usual in protest against the censorship, upon which I was sent to the naughty corner - no archive, no profile pic, posts can only be accessed by scrolling in a sidebar, so older posts are basically unretrievable (they don't show up in searches either).

One of the effects of the purge is that some NSFW artsy things that would have been all the rage on tumblr are now a bit harder to find. Following my December listing of free the nipple things, here are a few more things that should be on tumblr but don't have a home there any more.

La perla expuesta (a Spencer Tunick style art project connecting public spaces with human forms, which happened in Guadalajara, Mexico, last year apparently).

Performance Leonardo Otero (this is the title of the youtube video, don't know anything else about it, but it also seems to be set in Mexico).

Tove Lo live - a compilation of revealing moments ...

... and speaking of LGBTQ-related synth pop, here's t.A.T.u. in a Sept. 2013 reunion concert which I only just discovered. The notorious stage kisses have given way to hugs, and there are dancers with hilarious costumes and inflatable props, so what's not to like? This has given me some serious noughties nostalgia now. And made me realise that I need to work on reviving my Russian.

Reminiscing of the lost world of tumblr also reminded me of Clayton Cubitt's iconic series of videos Hysterical Literature, which has since then been transferred into many other languages including:
Spanish (?),
Catalan,
Portuguese,
Russian,
Chinese (?) ...
and here's author Candice Dawn using the format to promote her book Reclaiming Eros
and here is one of the original videos with the artist's explanations of his thinking.

PS sadly the alternative site 2mblr which I mentioned in previous posts never became fully functional - last time I checked it still worked as an uncensored archive but not as a live site where you can blog and reblog things. And the last time they copied content across from tumblr appears to have been in early May, so maybe they have given up entirely now?

science news 3.1.2019

Today's round-up of science stories. Links are normally to press releases on EurekAlert (at the bottom end I may also add a couple of newspaper stories). I include quotes from the summary (using quotation marks) in cases where the title alone doesn't reveal what the story is about.

If you missed the memo: In the last five years or so I used to share/archive a selection of news stories from Eurekalert on tumblr each day (as well as tweeting them), but as I expect tumblr will sink after the ridiculous nipple purge of Dec 17, I have now moved the archive function here, with one post each Tue-Fri collecting links to releases that I found noteworthy. Anyhow, here goes (not very many items today, so no categories needed):


Juno mission captures images of volcanic plumes on Jupiter's moon Io


Engineers, zoologists reveal how gulls 'wing morph' for stable soaring


Feisty hummingbirds prioritize fencing over feeding
"Hummingbirds are fierce fighters, but also efficient feeders with tongues and bills well adapted to extracting every bit of nectar from a flower. Why, then, do the males of some tropical species have bizarre hooks, serrations and hard tips that defeat efficient nectar extraction? Using high-speed video, UC Berkeley researchers have documented how these males use their weaponized bills to fight rivals for food and mates, and the trade-offs in choosing fighting prowess over feeding."


How does the brain learn by talking to itself?
My brain keeps asking itself that question, but never gets a good answer.


Fewer monarch butterflies are reaching their overwintering destination


This is a monarch butterfly.
Credit: Pat Davis


A 'pacemaker' for North African climate
"Researchers at MIT have analyzed dust deposited off the coast of west Africa over the last 240,000 years, and found that the Sahara, and North Africa in general, has swung between wet and dry climates every 20,000 years."


-----

In the news media today, we have a whole load of solar system exploration

* China's landing on the far side of the Moon. Media reports somehow forgot to mention that there must be an orbiter involved to relay communications. I'm pretty sure no existing communications technology can tunnel through the Moon. Anyhow, the Guardian report is here.

* And New Horizons' pics of Ultima Thule are getting better, here.

educating tumblr's AI

Update on the tumblr situation two weeks after the supposed purge: The change of policy has successfully driven away many of the creative people that made tumblr special, but so far (I last checked on Dec 31st) it has spectacularly failed to cover up most of the NSFW material.

My impression is that the AI is clearly failing to keep up with the sheer bulk of stuff swilling around on tumblr - I like to think that is just so busy with the photos that it hasn't got round to watching gifs and videos. Moreover, its sex education appears to be stuck in pre-school. It can recognise a female-presenting nipple in good light, but it is entirely clueless what people might be up to with their hands down their trousers, for instance.

Thus, watching tumblr's AI learning about the birds and the bees would be immensely fascinating if it wasn't at the same time in the business of killing an entire culture. I've spent way too much time throughout December testing the limits of the new system and making sure the interesting materials that mysteriously remained unflagged find wider distribution. But as of the new year, I'll take a bit of a break from that and look into alternatives, as tumblr is going down anyway, no matter how hopeless its censorship AI is.

So far there is a silver lining in that the rescue site 2mblr.com seems to be working as an uncensored archive, although it has no connectivity yet. Some have suggested it's a scam but so far it works for me, so let's hope for the best. Just under half of my main tumblr has copied across and is now to be seen uncensored (including lots of protest nipples from December) here. (I now also copied Street Music Oxford) Recently, an archive mode has also materialised, and just now my page features 4 "zombie posts" highlighted at the top, so things are definitely happening at 2mblr. (Update 7.1.: the site now has a follow button, network building starts here!)



Even my poor old painter smurf got flagged by the tumblr AI. This programme has no sense of humour and no appreciation for art.

free the nipple

Tumblr is set to implement its nipple ban on Monday 17th, and the petition against it is about to pass the 500,000 signatures target today, but I fear the ridiculous ban will go ahead. Even though the censorship AI is still pretty clueless about what may be art, what a political statement, or humour, or indeed porn.

As a few of us are indulging in throwing around all the nipples we can find, I am using this blog post to collect a few topless discoveries worth keeping after the shutters come down.

👀 The Swedish pop singer/songwriter Tove Lo, I learned this week, is not only a great advocate of body positivity but also prone to drop her top during her shows, especially during the song Talking body.



The longest exposure times I found on youtube (some serious research going into these blog entries!) are in the videos from the Lollapalooza 2017 Chicago (views from thefront and side of the stage are available) and at Emo's in Austin, Texas, also 2017. Stop press: just found her Glastonbury gig, where her top essentially consists of glitterpaint handprints. Everything else pales in comparison.

Funnily enough, the tumblr AI hasn't flagged these videos yet. I like to think that with all the furious posting that's happened in response to the ban, the AI has been kept so busy it didn't have time to watch videos.

👀 The Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society (OCTPFAS). Hope I got that name right. Making generous use of the fact that in New York going topless is legal for all genders due to equality laws, the OCTPFAS engaged in public activities and have created a huge amount of photos that were everywhere on tumblr, but are bound to disappear. In 2016 they performed Shakespeare's The Tempest outdoors and with not very many costumes. Follow their amazing Wordpress blog.

👀 Naked yoga - I never quite saw the point of yoga, but since tumblr told me that you can do it without clothes, it makes a lot more sense to me.

Some photographers who used to share work on tumblr and are now to be found elsewhere:

👀 Giovanni Pasini
👀 Tom Sutherland
👀 Yoram Roth
👀 Mr Chill



Some of the many freelance models presenting amazing work on tumblr:
👀 Roarie Yum
👀 Kelsey Dylan
👀 Trish Davis
👀 Sekaa
👀 Mona Poses




Articles about the tumblr purge and alternatives:

👀 This article in the Daily Dot discusses twitter, patreon, mastodon and pillowfort as alternatives.



----------------

Updates / additions


Articles about the state of nipple freedom

👀 Rhiannon Lucy Coslett about the state of topless sunbathing in summer 2019.

tumblr purge

It's a very sad moment for all of us who have loved tumblr over the last years, as the site will cease to exist in the form we knew from Monday 17th of December, also known as Black Monday. The site's unique selling point so far has been its complete openness to all things that humans obsess about, from a broad range of sexual flavours to popular culture fandoms and even hard science. It was also famous as a safe space for discussing mental health issues.

I've used tumblr since 2011, and identified my main account there as a book blog since September 2013. These years have been very educational, and I have written several features that were inspired by things I learned on tumblr (eg: online cultures; sharks)

From the 17th, the site will follow the lead of facebook and instagram and ban all things that could be vaguely seen as erotic, including, most notoriously, what the new user guidelines describe as "female-presenting nipples". Needless to say I'll be mostly blogging female-presenting nipples for the remainder of the time.

I really don't think the site can survive the exodus that is bound to happen. Nearly half a million people have signed the petition against the ban already. If they leave tumblr, the nature of networks says they will take others with them, so there will be millions of users missing. And tumblr will be left with Harry Potter fanfiction and nazis (because they, strangely, don't seem to be offensive to the new management).

While the tumblr AI is learning how to enact the purge, new posts allegedly violating the policy get flagged with a red bar at the top. Yesterday I shared a story about this from the guardian on tumblr. It got flagged immediately:



It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. (Oh, and by the way, I have suggested to my followers not to challenge the ridiculous flagging decisions. It's not in our interest to help the company improve its censorship AI.)

Other articles about the purge and its likely reasons (Apple emerges as a likely culprit in this story):


When Tumblr bans porn, who loses?
Verizon is leaving the engine of internet culture to sputter and die, and its communities to scramble for a new home.
Kaitlyn Tiffany

Tumblr's Porn Ban Reveals Who Controls What We See Online
Paris Martineau

Tumblr is banning adult content. It’s about so much more than porn.
Tumblr’s adult content ban is already harming the site’s vibrant community.
Aja Romano

Images of Jesus and superheroes caught up in Tumblr porn ban
Alex Hern

And one in French from France Culture:
Tumblr et le porno - Quand le capital dicte la morale

9 years on twitter

twitter tells me I've been on there for 9 years now - hover over the line where it says "joined in July 2009" and it will reveal the precise date and time. So many things have changed since then, but one thing I found surprisingly constant is the ratio of posts to followers, i.e. how many tweets to I have to send out to increase the number of followers by one. This ratio has been around 15 for as long as I can remember. Checking today, it is 15.04 posts per follower.

More intriguing still, the number is very similar on tumblr (15.98) where I do very different things. Much bigger on blogspot though (47), where the culture of following people never really took off. And smaller on flickr (7.13).

Obviously, for people who are more famous than I am this twitter impact ratio will be smaller, for others it may be bigger - so maybe it's a useful parameter for sociologists to study the social media pecking order (both figures that go into it are public)?


Another thing worth noting is that, since I started obsessing about the Galician language and occasionally tweeting in Galician or linking to Galician sources, these relatively rare ventures tend to spread very widely. Whenever I look at my stats, there's a Galician tweet in the top three. See for instance, from yesterday:

20 years online

I have no idea where that time went, but it appears that it’s 20 years ago today that I launched my first website, from which the current site evolved mostly by alternating courses of uninhibited random growth and moderate pruning.

In the last few years, and especially since my tumblr started to attract some followers from late 2012 onwards, I have neglected the old website a little bit, but just now I have cleaned it up a bit and updated things like the publications list. In a way, the various blogs and other online outlets could be seen as the shoots and flowers growing from the original tree I planted in 1996, so I’ll take this anniversary as an excuse to write up a short history of my web presence, although now, 20 years later, almost everybody on the planet has a web presence.

I feel my hair turning grey as I write this, but I actually managed to finish my PhD without ever having used the internet. I did write the thesis on a computer and had a Neolithic laptop, but the network as such was still under construction as I finished, and hadn’t reached my lab yet by the time I left. On arrival at Oxford in 1993 I learned about things like email, and the www, and some time in 1996 I must have realised that everybody could put a page (or twenty) on the web, so why not me?

In the xmas break I learned the essentials of HTML from a book and started composing my home page, which launched on 30.12.1996 under the not so original title of Michael’s Home Page. Rooted in an old technology newspapers and magazines background, I aimed at publishing a numbered issue every week, with sections including science, science communication, bilingualism.

On 13.1.1997, issue 3 appeared with title “Only Connect!”, based on the quote from EM Forster’s novel Howards End which still serves as a motto today and has provided the title and URL for my blog, proseandpassion.com.

After a year, the site had 43 pages, and it soon grew into a tree structure with eight or nine first level pages branching out into hundreds of second and third level ones. For nine years and a bit, it remained my main web presence, and I probably spent way too much time on updating it, which may well have killed my academic career.

Then, in the tenth year, and a few years after leaving the academic career behind, I found my way to MySpace and discovered blogging, as every MySpace account came with a blog by default. For comparison, I also tried yahoo/geocities and blogspot, which is the one I kept using after MySpace went down the drain.

When I moved out of Birkbeck College in 2006, a version of my website stayed there, and is still online here). Incidentally this is about the last version before I introduced the “bookshelf” design of the front page which is still up today, launched in July 2006.

After the great Exodus from MySpace, I joined Facebook, then twitter, and finally tumblr. Initially twitter worked best for me, but in the last few years tumblr has become the outlet where followers actually see and react to my stuff. Although the stats on blogspot aren’t too bad either these days.

With all the excitement of the more interactive and “social” sites, the old website got neglected a little bit, but I still polish it up when I have a new book to promote, or, as happened this year, when the delay in the publications list becomes too embarrassing.

At some point, I may even blow some dust off the 10-year-old front page design. I’ll put that on my (virtual) list of New Year’s resolutions.

My front page as it looks today - I think my initial idea was to change those bookends regularly to refresh the look, but I got stuck with the second pair I made ...

The site is at
http://www.michaelgross.co.uk/
as well as at
michaelgross.info

how to burst the filter bubble

Review of The Filter Bubble
by Eli Pariser
Penguin 2011

Last year, when the publication of a psychology experiment conducted on facebook highlighted the dubious ways in which the company manipulates people’s timelines, some clever observers remarked that this wasn’t really new, and it was all described in Eli Pariser’s book. Which, amazingly, was the first time I heard of the book.

Having picked up a copy for £ 2 on the flea market (somebody clearly thought it was no longer relevant) I’ve now read the book. Essentially it confirms my hunch that the internet took a turn for the worse when the major global monopolists amazon, google and facebook personalised their services and started to pretend that they know which books I want to read, which search results I want to see and which ads I might be interested in. The resulting limitation to what one can see of the internet is the phenomenon that Pariser calls the filter bubble.

Pariser explains very eloquently why this is bad news. It’s bad for creativity, because it removes the possibility of serendipitous findings and unexpected connections (which are basically the things that pay my mortgage, so bad news for me especially!). It’s bad for democracy, because people only surrounded by the opinions they agree with and the friends that have similar views will fail to see that there may be another side to the argument. The anti-Islam movement Pegida in Dresden and other German cities originated as a Facebook group –although long after the Filter Bubble was published. And far from fulfilling the internet’s early promise of distributing power to the people, the application of opaque filtering methods concentrates unseen and unaccountable power in the hands of a small number of global companies.

What can we do about it? One can’t completely opt out of it, as an increasing number of services would just stop working if you chose to block all cookies. Pariser says companies should be open about what kind of filtering and personalisation they apply to any given product. But seeing that the key players hold quasi monopolies, what are the chances that they will comply with Pariser’s wish? Four years after his book was published, I haven’t seen it happening, and the affair around the Facebook experiment seems to suggest they are still blissfully unaware of the problem. Governments could perhaps legislate to enforce more openness, but then again, they never understood the internet anyway, and are already failing to make the companies pay their taxes. Not much hope there either.

Which leaves only consumer choice. I have always preferred social sites with an element of anarchy and randomness to facebook with its emphasis on real names and real friendships. Pariser, although he admits to enjoying facebook as much as the next person, praises twitter for its unfiltered timeline and clarity regarding where filtering is applied. For instance, in searching for hash tags, you can choose between “top results” and “all results”. I would add tumblr to that recommendation, as it also has an unfiltered timeline and the most amazing random people on the planet. (As far as I know, my 1260 followers on tumblr include only one person I have met in real life.) And if you do use Facebook (as I grudgingly do once a week), make an effort to venture outside your bubble. Befriend random people, do unpredictable things. Confuse the algorithms.

Similarly for search, try to think beyond Google, maybe use several search engines. I use duck duck go as default, and only resort to versions of Google when I need results in a different language, so for instance, google.de for family history explorations in Germany. Google’s bots must think that I’m only interested in dead people.

As for amazon, as I’ve explained before, they haven’t managed to figure me out in 15 years, and I don’t think they ever will. It would take a human being to actually read what I write, and they only have computers. So my remedy is: be wide ranging and unpredictable. Surprise yourself and the algorithms. Burst the filter bubble.

three months of street music

My street music blog on tumblr, which is three months old today, is beginning to find an audience. Going slowly, but six times faster than my main blog on tumblr, which was at a comparable stage after 18 months ...

I'm mixing up my own photos and videos of Oxford buskers with reblogs from around the world, which results in a colourful mix of open-air music-making:

So do drop by if you can.

freezing facebook

After what I’ve learned this week about manipulation of timelines by facebook, I‘ve decided to freeze my facebook account. This means I will not close it, to make sure my sign-off post explaining the reasons remains visible and people can find the links to my pages on other social sites, but I’ve blocked twitter from forwarding my tweets, so there should be nothing new coming in.

It’s not mainly the fact that the research they carried out on “emotional contagion” was unethical because there was no informed consent, although this was certainly unacceptable. Personally I would have been unlikely to be hit by facebook's mood manipulation, as I rarely check the timeline. It's worrying to think what other uses the site might find for similar "experiments".

What affects me more and makes it pointless for me to share things on facebook are the routine manipulations that were revealed in the wake of the fiasco. From this story I’ve learned why my tweets forwarded to facebook no longer got any reactions: As I didn’t use facebook directly very often, so didn’t put many likes and responses on people’s posts and don’t interact much, I was accorded low priority in people’s timelines, so they were less likely to see my stuff unless they specifically visited my own page (and for those who are ready to put in this extra effort, I’d rather they visit my blog on blogspot).

Which is a vicious circle, really. If you’re not so popular on Facebook, the algorithm will make you even less so by de-prioritising your content in other people’s streams. This is a turbo-charged popularity contest, worse than anything happening in real life.

For regular updates, follow this blog, my twitter, and/or my tumblr - further links are under "VISIT MY" in the margin (underneath the green astrobiology cover).

Quote from one of the explanatory pieces in the Guardian:

How many stories is Facebook filtering out, and how? Backstrom explained in August that Facebook's news feed algorithm boils down the 1,500 posts that could be shown a day in the average news feed into around 300 that it "prioritises". How does this algorithm work? Backstrom explained that factors include: how often you interact with a friend, page or public figure; how many likes, shares and comments individual posts have received; how much you have interacted with that kind of post in the past; and whether it’s being hidden and/or reported a lot.

PS: I missed Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble when it came out - that would have warned me. A discussion of the Facebook newsfeed in relation to the filter bubble theory is here.

the perks of being a book blogger

On September 2nd, I changed my “about” text to indicate that my tumblr blog would henceforth be focused on book-related things:

“I blog and reblog old books, new books, science books, story books, books I read, find, collect or write. Also: science, photography, art, movies with subtitles, pop/rock/latin music, cello and flute music, fair trade, and a modicum of nudity.”

This was simply because since December last year, the main source of notes for my material and new followers for my blog was reblogging from the lovely bookporn blog, so by September an overwhelming majority of my followers must have found me that way. In order to a) give those followers more of what they fancy, and b) increase the “stick factor”, i. e. the percentage among the visitors who find me via a bookporn reblog who then decide to follow me, I made the whole blog a bit more bookish. It’s not exclusively about books, but sufficiently so to get bookish visitors to accept it as a book blog.

Eight weeks into the experience, I can reveal that this switch has been quite successful. The perks of being a book blogger include:

* most trivially, having a focus that actually fits my existing URL and headline, which is a literary quote (from E.M. Forster, Howard’s End)

* by looking at other book blogs to find material to reblog, I’m getting to look at other people’s books at leisure …

* I’m still able to cover all topics that interest me, as all can be covered in books! Specifically, there is still science (especially scientific illustrations, as can be found in books), music, art, and politics.

* I can find a wider audience for my growing reservoir of book reviews, plus leave a scent mark for those books that I would really like to read but realistically will never find the time to (both are included in the “a book a day” tag)

* the bedtime belles I usually reblog as a sign-off at night look even more seductive if they are reading a lovely book,

* I‘m now gaining two followers per day (as opposed to one per day in the months since last December, while I was benefiting from bookporn influx but had no clear identity for the blog).

* I’m being constantly reminded to actually make time to read a book !

For the time being, this blogspot blog will remain the usual eclectic mix of science, culture etc., so if you like snooping around other people's books, find me at http://proseandpassion.tumblr.com/.

One of those bookish flickr pics of mine which have acquired hundreds of views from the tumblr book fandom.

online culture

Why is tumblr like ancient Egypt? How do you recognise if a twitter user is part of a specific tribe? Will edit wars on Wikipedia end in peace deals or carry on forever? And why have some social networks turned into ghost towns?

All these questions and more are addressed in my feature on the cultural evolution of online social networks, which is out now in Current Biology:

What makes people click?

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 7, R255-R258, 8 April 2013
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.03.047

Free access to

HTML text

PDF file

Twitter users grouped into tribes, annotated with words typically used by each group. Graphic: John Bryden, Sebastian Funk and Vincent Jansen

tumblr and I

These days I am spending most of my online social networking time on tumblr, which is ironic, as it took me well over a year before I got the hang of it.

I had been homeless on the web since MySpace turned into a ghost town and the forums I had visited also died at around the same time – probably all due to the unstoppable rise of facebook. While I’ve been able to transfer quite a few of these contacts to facebook, I never really liked spending time there. In 2010, I signed up to twitter, which I like a lot, but it is a medium more than a place. I can use it to widen the audience for blog entries (on blogspot) or photos (on flickr), but if I spend more than five minutes watching my twitter timeline (following some 1600 people!), the futility and randomness of it gets to me. Unless there is some major political scandal to kick around, which is always fun on twitter. (I also tried google+ but that never took off, and I am registered with LinkedIn, but it bores me to tears.)

So, well, tumblr and I started out on the wrong foot. I signed up in June 2011 when somebody whom I knew from mutual blog-following on blogspot moved her blogging activity to tumblr and I wanted to stay in touch. However, she soon succumbed to the temptation of the NSFW blogs available on tumblr and ended up reblogging that kind of stuff endlessly without posting anything of her own.

In the first months I didn’t come across any individuals who were actually posting their own content. Everything I saw back then seemed to be just swirling round in circles (which I guess is where the name tumblr comes from?) and come from unattributed sources, i.e. probably stolen. Using tags like #science I found some vaguely interesting blogs that I still follow, like the mother nature network, which covers science and environment, but that didn’t really pull me in.

The legacy of my very first contact in tumblr meant that I had no shortage of addresses for erotica, but once I eliminated all peniswaving blogs, I was left with a few lesbian ones (which I still love) and one that systematically reblogs “topless Tuesday” photos. For a few months I just let these float by, but at one point I started to wonder who these women were. If I liked the face above the boobs I looked up the blog and found quite a few interesting people who – and that was rather important to me – did post their own content, rather than just reblogging all the time.

Some of them even very kindly followed me back, so by that stage – perhaps 1 year into the experience - I had around 20 followers (as many as my blog on blogspot has, except that I don’t think that anybody still checks the blogs they follow there). That gave me a little bit more confidence to expect that somebody, at some point might actually look at contributions I post, so I systematically posted links to my articles and blog entries from blogspot. That helped a little bit, some people became interested in the science bits I had to offer.

Then I widened my spectrum, discovered that there is a one-click option to share my flickr photos on tumblr, also posted the odd video, and ended up sharing everything I posted elsewhere (blogspot, twitter, flickr, facebook) on tumblr as well, and more. By the beginning of this month, the increased activity succeeded in attracting new followers on a daily basis, and catalysing new friendships in a way that I hadn’t really experienced since the demise of myspace.

Tumblr really has become a place on the web where I like to spend time, where I’m surrounded by people who I like, even if they are still mostly strangers. I find it amazing how openly people communicate about very intimate problems over there, and how supportive and loving most people are (apart from some anon. trolling – personally I’ve switched off anonymous asks, so I don’t have that problem). I’m beginning to worry that this is too good to last and that Murdoch might soon buy it up and ruin it (this irrational fear will in the future be called the MySpace trauma). I'm just hoping it stays exactly as it is.