The Teenage Traped in Social Media What Type of Art Is It
Cathode angel. Spinning in glitchy grace. Ageless sylph gyroscope. What unearthly bulletin do y'all deport our lost kind?
ONCE UPON A TIME — May 20, 2013, to be exact — the perennially uncool multinational company Yahoo announced that it had acquired the new and hip social networking site Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. The panic amidst its user base was swift, global, and of course "shared" through Tumblr itself, every bit its overwhelming young fans unleashed clever, angry memes to voice their complaints and concerns at being integrated into arguably the to the lowest degree hip corporate mothership of all. Several months afterwards, however, and little seems to have inverse in the site's daily functioning. Tumblr is even so one of the most popular online places to exchange bits and bytes with mostly unknown "friends" for little more than than the pleasure of doing and so, although censorship of taboo pornographic content is no doubt more vigilant than earlier, with the increased resources available. Indeed, it was just such content that led to Tumblr's exponential growth, and its impressive "stickiness" with users (referring, beyond the innuendo, to the habit quota which lures people back to their own Tumbls, and away from other distractions of the day, such equally Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, or Facebook).
Merely to simply place Tumblr within the massive and seedy cherry-red-light district of the internet would be a mistake, despite the sheer quantity of unclothed human beefcake on offer. For one thing, everything on Tumblr instantly becomes "porn" one time the upload is complete; that is, in the recently adopted sense of the discussion: a generalized fetish for any object whatever. Whether a Tumblr'due south microblog is defended to pets, cupcakes, celebrities, cars, fonts, medieval manuscripts, or global wind patterns, everything on the site is — past virtue of its minimalist operating system and mandate — porn. Hence we accept nutrient porn, beautiful porn, architecture porn, blueprint porn, book porn, earth porn, data porn, and every other type of porn imaginable. What'south more, these new porn-forms are then mixed and matched together, according to the zeitgeist's penchant (if I may mimetically mix linguistic poachings), for maximum hybrid effect.
The skilful-erstwhile fashioned type of porn on offer (flagged by Stephen Colbert equally Tumblr's raison d'être, during an interview with its founder, David Karp) spans the unabridged spectrum — from peek-a-boo vanilla cheesecake to edgy LGBT chocolate chip with crimson swirls. The overwhelming majority of erotic imagery on Tumblr, withal, is self-consciously just that: "erotic." This is "tasteful" porn, shot by men, mostly, but circulated by chicks, for chicks. Chicks halfway through their undergraduate degree in English language (and, no dubiousness, the savvier guys who desire to seduce them, most likely by reading them Keats or Milan Kundera). A typical user might pair an image of a topless model in stockings and suspenders — staring out from a Parisian balcony, halfway through winsomely reading a letter — with a quote from Anaïs Nin or Lana Del Rey. (Herself a torch-singer for an age more interested in the nocturnal glow of the smartphone.) Or even more likely, they might put up an blithe gif of Anna Karina arguing playfully with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard's A Adult female Is a Adult female; complete with captured subtitle, expressing a sentiment which precisely 34,000 fellow Tumblrs appreciate and tin relate to (according to the number of "notes" attached to said image — this community'south equivalent of "likes" … which in plow denotes an automated "share" along viral vectors. Hence the proper noun, as images tumble around and around the internet, like a giant tumble dryer).[1]
Despite literally millions of exceptions, then, the rule and heart of Tumblr is a shared aesthetic that is at once nostalgic, romantic, dreamy, timeless, sexy, and allusive. (Of course all such terms should be read with invisible scare quotes.) Every bit such, Tumblr seems explicitly designed to embody that quondam chestnut, "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." Instead, information technology is a new type of digitized nostalgia-lite, at countless removes from whatsoever locatable mnemonic hurting or visceral spasm. And so, information technology crystallizes the collective visual memory of a generation that is neither collective nor blessed with memory. This, of course, leaves only the visual — flood with floating signifiers of untasted elsewheres and elsewhens (precisely its appeal, no uncertainty). Tumblr is a promiscuous yearning machine, untroubled by such random juxtapositions as 1920s flappers, a young Marlon Brando, an aging Ron Burgundy, rich Japanese impressions of French desserts, an idyllic tropical beach, stills from Czech New Moving ridge films, a random steampunk cosplay selfie with sepia filter, a three-second grab from a 1980s anime motion picture, distressing Etsy boyfriends, a baby elephant tripping over its ears, supermodels tripping over their heels, a teenage girl proudly showing the scars from a recent suicide attempt, the kinds of one-time timey objects you'd find in Wes Anderson movies (gramophones, chapeau boxes, vintage sextants, etc.), and, of course, cats. Lots and lots of cats.
Here the key term might be vintage, but it is non of any specific vintage per se; equally if the sommelier poured wine from a bottle simply labeled "vintage wine." Taken one by ane, each image may have its ain modest modicum of artful merit, even if the overwhelming majority would be discounted as pure kitsch past your local art history professor. But whatever the skilful opinion, these serve as mini-portals to escapist fantasies the viewer may not take realized they even had, non then much indulged in as archived for a afterwards appointment that never comes. The viewer may drool over an obscenely exhibitionist grilled cheese sandwich or a handsome couple tangoing in 1940s Buenos Aires, but not for longer than it takes to whorl down to the next temptation, lifted from a brochure of a life out of achieve. Fantasy, which has nourished and compensated the modern soul since Madame Bovary, is now more ubiquitous than e'er, focus-grouped for like shooting fish in a barrel digestion. (Think Wallpaper magazine equally guest-curated by spambots.) Equally such, this is photography sans punctum, drained of the potential to prick, wound, or transport. An iconic eulogy to indexicality, and the intimacy it used to bring. A reference to a reference of a reference. It is Adorno's bill of fare, covered in the saliva of other diners who similarly failed to exist served the actual meal. These images are "the scattered fragments of the aura"[ii]; replicant memories[iii]; tiny splinters of pre-scripted daydreams; libidinal Muzak … the polished scales shed past the snake that already ate itself. And as a consequence, Tumblr has the emotional resonance or power of an advertising visitor's "mood board" for the latest B-list celebrity fragrance.
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Only isn't it the instance that I am caricaturing an unabridged demographic or generation, merely every bit these photos are caricatures of someone else'due south enviable lifestyle? The question of the entreatment of Tumblr, despite its empty and sterile scopophilic promise, should be finessed and contextualized. Conspicuously, the site is a millennial nexus, offering clues to the psyche of a generation traumatized by terror attacks, ecological catastrophes, economic collapses, crushing debt, anxious futures, and reality TV. They are besieged from every angle, working precarious jobs, if they are luckier than their friends. Who would begrudge them a chip of vicarious travel porn, between sending out mindless promotional tweets from the cubicle in their suburban startup (soon to be wound down)?
The very moment that technology affords escape from the tyranny of geography, economic realities ensure that these will be almost ever only virtual escapades. And just as space becomes strangely elastic, time also loses its traditional shape and direction. In the 20th century, troubled people in the prime of their life at to the lowest degree had the comfort (i.east., art) of commonage alienation, and the compensations afforded by melancholia. Merely today, as cultural critic Marker Fisher points out, "loss is itself lost," thanks to the eternal nowadays of YouTube'southward — and indeed Tumblr's — "conditions of digital think." Fisher goes on to discuss the "temporal bleed-through" of this novel form of anachronism, created in large function past the flattening archive of Google'southward perfect memory. Here we are all not only witnesses only signatories of "the slow counterfoil of the futurity" (Berardi). The 21st century is thus marked by inertia. "But this stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of 'newness', of perpetual motility. The 'jumbling up of time', the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now then prevalent that information technology is no longer fifty-fifty noticed."[4]
Such a situation only highlights the lack of revolutionary potential within contemporary media. For while it is the God-given correct of every older person to exist shocked, appalled, and confused by the signifiers of the young, today is shocking past its very stubborn (over)familiarity. "Rather than the old recoiling from the 'new' in fearfulness and incomprehension," writes Fisher, "those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more probable to exist startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms." The result: we are faced with cultural accumulation and stagnation to an unprecedented caste, just whipped into a superficially appealing frappé by the well tended blenders of Brandingland.
Justin Clemens and I have previously chosen this form of mediatized glut "sampling": whereby recognizable units of (pop) culture are recycled to the extent that their origin and powers of allusion become lost.[5] Sampling, we argue, functions according to a unlike logic to former historical modes, such as quotation or appropriation, in which the reference is shared and understood. In the latter, a social fabric of legible signs and landmarks assistance us navigate the quicksand of commonage significant. And then even as Marcel Duchamp draws a moustache on the Mona Lisa, the viewer recognizes the Mona Lisa, and thus the irreverent mischief backside the gesture. And while I presume almost all Tumblr users all the same recognize the Mona Lisa, even if they couldn't proper name the artist on the spot, the currency of shared references has been depreciating exponentially by virtue of its memetic circulation. (And here Baudrillard was indeed a prophet.) Sampling removes the proverbial quotation marks used to admit a piece of reified and exchangeable culture, so that information technology may — paradoxically simply inevitably — escape the confines and orientation points of origin. Henceforth, every possible statement, gesture, activity, or interaction unfolds inside generalized quotation marks — and so much so, they no longer need be signaled. This is why your life is a patchwork of quondam Telly shows, movies, ads, popular songs, and music videos, to the extent where it would be redundant to place any of them by name. (In this sense, Tarantino is the last of the fanboy trainspotters, still caring well-nigh which cinematic tic comes from where, even every bit he undermines the wider motivation to do so, through sheer generic overlay and repetition.) As i of the latest instances of sampling, Tumblr images are bubble-glue cards that no longer connect to a detached narrative, simply offering a single scene or snippet, surgically removed from context. The meta-frame of "movie" or "advertising" or "Goggle box show" is removed, so all stories flow into all others, resulting in plenty brown stale backwash to drown a continent.
But even so, we peer through windows into worlds that don't remind us of anything in detail, except perchance the last fourth dimension we felt a similar moment of pseudo-mourning for the very loss of lost experience. (A déjà–déjà vu, if you volition.) What's more, exchanging such tokens, click past click, exacerbates an Add-OCD shuffle-button experience of affect: the "adjacent, next, next" impulse of Chatroulette. Feelings of pathos, hunger, "squee,"[6] regret, lust … they all swirl together into a fractal, centrifugal sense of self. Melancholia hither would exist the eternal interim out of our refusal to let history get, despite the fact that it has long left the building, and usa — but partially ravished — in our attractively disheveled underwear. Not seduced and abandoned, only seduced past abandonment.
Information technology would exist too easy, however, to condemn Tumblr as zilch more than yet another manifestation of the paradox of disconnected souls, sharing their alienation through overconnected technologies: Sherry Turkle's update of the movie palace's feel of being "solitary together." (Even if that is patently true on one level.) Perchance, despite everything I have said thus far, it is a gathering place for a new form of belonging. A Trojan horse fabricated upwards of glossy commercialized images, allowing less astroturfed desires to realize themselves in ways every bit notwithstanding unvisualized. Specially if we read these images as examples of what new-media theorist and artist Hito Steyerl calls "paradigm spam." For Steyerl, the stock photography and human clip fine art that flows through our modems like claret plasma of neo-liberalism represent "our message to the future." "Who are the people portrayed in this type of accelerated ad?" she asks. "And what could their images tell potential extraterrestrial recipients about contemporary humanity?"
The Tumblr species of image spam are — like their pop-up cousins —
horny, super skinny, armed with recession-proof college degrees, and e'er on time for their service jobs, courtesy of their replica watches. […] A reserve ground forces of digitally enhanced creatures who resemble the pocket-size demons and angels of mystic speculation, luring, pushing and blackmailing people into the profane rapture of consumption.
So while "[i]mage spam is addressed to the vast majority of humankind […] it does not show them." Meaning, "information technology is an accurate portrayal of what humanity is really non. It is a negative paradigm." Merely rather than merely bemoan the ideological misrepresentation at work in this scopic economy, Steyerl asks a fascinating and provocative question:
What if actual people — the imperfect and nonhorny ones — were not excluded from spam advertisements because of their assumed deficiencies only had actually chosen to desert this kind of portrayal? What if epitome spam thus became a record of a widespread refusal, a withdrawal of people from representation?
From this counterintuitive perspective, all the alluring bodies that populate Tumblr are the avatars of a voluntarily vanishing of the vowel-challenged. "If photography was a civil contract between the people who participated in information technology," she writes, "and then the electric current withdrawal from representation is the breaking of a social contract, having promised participation just delivered gossip, surveillance, evidence, [and] series narcissism."
Information technology makes sense, then, that Fisher agrees with Steyerl that withdrawal is probably the merely way to short-circuit this default mode of connexion, sharing, liking, and binging. "Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal," he writes, "from, for example, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms." However, "the currently dominant course of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its drench of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than always earlier." Aesthetically, the Spectacle through which we alive is suffering from a severe "temporal pathology," which manifests itself in generalized repetition-compulsion. (Is that a real 1980s pop hit, or a new hipster pastiche? Does it matter?) Meanwhile, underneath the screen, equally it were, massive upheavals are occurring on the level of product, consumption, and all the things — and people — these structure socially, economically, and psychologically. The more than things change in i sphere, the more they stay the same in another. No dubiousness, this arrangement suits the architects and engineers of both.[7]
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In my own semi-hypnotized travels through this interactive utopian-dystopian java-table book, I was brought brusk by i particular animated image, then perfect and unshadowed in its form that fifty-fifty Plato himself might accept pressed the "re-postal service" button. [8] Information technology was a ii-second animated gif, necessarily looped: the pixelated quintessence of everything I've touched upon. It depicts the summit half of a young woman, or girl, anywhere between 10 and 30, in a medium shot self-consciously rendered as "cinematic" and "analog." She twirls in silhouette, with a setting sun behind her, shut to an unseen horizon. Her faced is as washed out every bit the saturation. The stock is warm: the green-yellowish-brown palette of 1970s Polaroids, but in motion. Despite the lack of orienting clues, the viewer feels the scene is scooped up from California or the Southwestern desert. Either manner, information technology is beamed to united states from the nowhereland of carefree babyhood, which we all have a correct to remember, fifty-fifty if it never existed. At one point in this circular nano-movie, the invisible frame jumps down into sight, equally if shifting uneasily in the sprockets of a Super viii projector. [9] The waif's long, blondish pilus flares out like a halo, complementing the subtle solar flares and grainy textures of the "film stock." Here, truly, is the Tumblrst Tumbl Ever Tumbld.
Indeed, if I could put one image in a fourth dimension capsule to distill and correspond the spirit of the times, information technology would be this one. Faceless withal gendered, modernistic nevertheless vintage, moving yet trapped, evocative even so empty — the visual equivalent of a tardily Boards of Canada album. That is to say, the sound of i globe-historical-nostalgic-nihilistic system clapping. It crystallizes the unspoken but unanimously understood ethos that "Dasein is pattern" (Lovink), and Existence is any (Agamben, by way of Honey Boo Boo).
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In his famous allegory for the catastrophic progress of history, Walter Benjamin employed Paul Klee's angel, blown forward into the future, while staring back at the destruction from which the angel came. Were Benjamin writing in the age of the cyberspace, he may take chosen a different avatar for his reading of "time out of joint." Instead of bipolar-linearity, the frenetic and futile energy of an angel twirling like a spinning top.
Twirling, twirling, twirling … until dizzy. While not moving an inch.
NOTES
[ane] 1 of the most intriguing aspects of this informal rating arrangement is the common occurrence where two seemingly interchangeable images are separated in popularity by tens of thousands of votes.
[two] Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: The Kitsch Experience (Minneapolis: Academy of Minnesota Press, 2002), 84. Kitsch is thus "the leftover of modernity's own dreams of transcendence" (ibid.). And then to say, "Offset with the nineteenth century and the process of commodification, remembrances underwent a 2nd death that made them into souvenirs, 'expressionless' objects lacking mystical charge, secular relics liable to the contaminating touch of the world. Non content with this, modernity struck remembrances a tertiary mortal blow — ironically, one that offered them dialectic movement. The destructive lightning strike was mechanical reproduction, and the shattered remains left after this major electrical storm were none other than kitsch" (81).
[3] "Replicants are obsessed with photographs. Where the Replicants tin can't be entirely sure of the validity of their ain pasts, pictures provide a visual totem, a physical connection to the implanted "absorber" of their memories. In our world, photographs — as well as the phonograph records of Benjamin's critique — have long since given manner to digital reproductions. We've managed to abstract the media fifty-fifty further, past manipulating the digital to evoke previous analog formats. As filters on digital photos make images look "vintage," and digital effects make recordings audio like scratchy vinyl, we are facing crisis of context. It's not merely longing. Information technology's the undermining of that longing." (Roy Christopher, http://omnireboot.jerrickventures.com/features/replicant-memories/).
[four] Fisher rightly identifies Frederic Jameson equally i of the most prescient cultural critics in the 1980s and '90s to recognize this "alarming and pathological symptom of a lodge that has become incapable of dealing with time and history." Come across "An Excerpt From Marking Fisher'due south Ghosts Of My Life," The Quietus, August 28, 2013. (http://thequietus.com/articles/13004-marker-fisher-ghosts-of-my-life-extract)
[v] Dominic Pettman & Justin Clemens. "A Break in Transmission: Fine art, Cribbing and Aggregating," Fugitive the Discipline: Media, Culture, and the Object (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004).
[6] A new give-and-take describing the clutch of nonsexual want elicited by cute pictures, most always fluffy animals.
[vii] Jodi Dean's work on "chatty capitalism" is essential here, equally is McKenzie Wark's on the vectoralist class. The question of Tumblr-coded architectonics, and the types of political communication they allow (in contrast to, say, Twitter), is an important one, deserving of a more focused treatment than I tin can offering in the present essay. Notwithstanding, I would note hither that I originally intended to publish this piece on Tumblr at the address: thetumblresttumbleevertumbled.tumblr.com, simply the site refused to allow the word "tumblr" in the name of the blog. Surely a systemic sign of unwillingness to be self-reflexive.
[viii] For reference, at time of writing this image had 226,576 "notes" or "likes" attached — a spectacularly high number — reinforcing my initial hunch that this was Tumblr crack. Information technology was originally posted at: http://welcometothestateofdreaming.tumblr.com/mail/21881494922 on April 26, 2012.
Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tumblrst-tumbl-ever-tumbld-found-angel-history-trapped-flypaper-social-media/
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