Memories (mostly of Tumblr)
This post is my entry for the October Bear Carnival. I decided to talk about some of my early experiences with socializing on the internet, probably spanning the years of about 2008-2016.
I don't remember exactly when I got my first email address, but I think was in elementary school. It was through Gmail, and I used it to message my friends, and even attempted to get pen pals a couple times. I vividly remember getting some absolutely absurd chain letters that scared the hell out of me. I was a literal child, so I did genuinely think that if I didn't send them to other people, some ghost would get me in the middle of the night. My parents were very patient people.
Thinking about my early experiences with email always reminds me of that one line from Spy Kids 3 (one of the movies I watched incessantly as a kid) where Juni laments that he "never even got her email address" when he loses touch with a girl. It cracks me up. But yeah, it felt like a big deal to get someone's email at the time.
I got Facebook when I was around eleven or twelve, and it felt almost like a rite of passage. It was what all the adults were spending their time on, after all. I don't remember posting much, but I do remember spending a lot of time on Facebook Messenger with my friends from school. I was lucky enough to find some fellow dweebs who would roleplay as fictional characters with me. We later moved to other apps like Skype, Oovoo, and Kik. I don't even know if the latter two exist anymore.
Tumblr
Tumblr shaped the vast majority of my time on the internet, and probably shaped a good chunk of my personality, too. I remember signing up for an account when I was twelve, because I wanted to be a rebel who lied about my age (but only by one year, because I was scared to actually get in trouble). If you are unfamiliar with Tumblr culture or slang, this may sound like nonsense, but I entered around the height of the SuperWhoLock1 era and the general attempt to create an identity around using Tumblr (see: "I like your shoelaces" / "Thanks, I stole them from the president").
I have a love-hate relationship with Tumblr. On the plus side, I probably learned more about what it was like to be queer from there than I did from anywhere else, pre-college. Mainstream media was and is sanitized and mass-marketable. Tumblr was not. Sure, I knew gay and trans people existed before Tumblr, but I never knew what they were actually like or what they actually believed, and I certainly hadn't thought that I could be one of them.
What I didn't like about Tumblr was the discourse. My little, socially anxious brain was not ready to be bombarded with a billion bad-faith criticisms of any given topic or piece of media. I often feel like it was a big contributor to the perfectionism that I am now trying to unlearn, since it pretty much taught me that one misstep will lead to ostracism.
I know it's a very different site now than it was in 2012, but I don't go on it much anymore unless I'm looking for something specific. It's great for finding niche fanart (I literally found fanart for War and Peace on there), and it's great for finding Sims custom content and stories. I don't find it to be good for socializing. There's just an air of sarcasm and superiority about most of the popular posts there. Not my thing. The nonsensical posts, however, are absolutely my thing. I hope the weirdos are thriving.
I will also still defend most Tumblr "cringe". It seems to me that most things people cringe at, anyway, are either things they wish they were brave enough to do themselves or neurodivergent people being openly neurodivergent. Just let people live. Or better yet, just be cringe.
I'm not really sure how to conclude this. Hopefully you found it interesting, or nostalgic, or both.
Notes
If you're curious, Strange Aeons has a good summary.↩