Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
I run a FITSPO site, concerning health and fitness, and one of the things that I find intriguing is the interaction between the community members, the other TUMBLRS. Gaming is very much like this in some ways because you can strike up conversations on the side several different ways, depending on how you set up your site. Did I mention, it’s free?
But, don’t let me get ahead of myself. Tumbr is a place where you can explore literally everything; it’s the encyclopedia of images and all you have to do is name any word and a TUMBLR (no “e”) site will pop up with images about that arena of thought. And, if you know how to pay attention, there will be, at the bottom of the image, the names and locations of all those who liked this, reblogged this, or even originally posted this image, and you can follow its history all the way back to its origin. I find that intriguing.
If nothing else, it is the breadth of TUMBLR that is so amazing. It is anonymous if you want it to be, and signing up is easy. You can, as I said, talk and blog and message your friends and strangers. And you can add pictures and information for a variety of resources like YOU TUBE or other video mediums, text, photos from your camera, or even write your own poetry or travel log. It’s easy as pie.
If you go to a TUMBLR site and you want to see all of it all at once, you can simply type in the word “archive” at the end of the addy, and everything that person has ever posted will pop up on your computer screen from their TUMBLR. So, if you want to explore this, simply Google Tumblr and any word, pull up a TUMBLR page, add a back slash and the word “archive” and the entire history of that page will pop up. Okay, so why is this so fascinating to me?
Here is something that social media does: It documents change over time. If you looked back over your past, there would be a bread crumb trail from where you began until how you got where you are. This is more apparent when we look at the actions of others. We can see their transformation over time much more clearly, and our own changes seem more organic and easily translucent to us. Others, however, seem to present stark moments where things had been going this way and then some traumatic moment hit where things went different. Or maybe over time we shifted from “X” to “Y.” Or maybe we shifted from “Y” to “Y-not.”
In any case, whether your focus is religion or drugs or hate or love or unicorns, whatever your point of fascination, the trajectory of TUMBLR will show the ever drifting phases of consciousness, however unconscious, and it reveals them graphically. The choices we make are vivid and revealing. I think that all relationships should have TUMBLR sites so that partners can tell each other things in pictorial fashion. Parents and kids could post things that showed mood changes or changes in direction, a sort of thermometer of the day for how things are going. Kids would reveal an ever-increasing distaste for the strings attached to the ever-increasing sum of money that they are seeking to extract from their parents. Parents could reveal the ever-increasing concern they have with the money their kids are extracting and the ever-increasing silence and secrecy they displace it with. Intriguing.
The government could reveal how they covertly use our taxes for the benefit of some. Corporations could show their own shifts. Personally, a TUMBLR by terrorist groups would seem helpful. Here is what we are working on or planning. Nice, eh?
So, if you have not checked out TUMBLR, Google it, put in ANY WORD you want to know more about, and up will pop a bunch of things. As always, it’s the Internet, so travel at your own risk. 6 degrees of separation on the web will get you to its opposite in only few clicks.
I sent out this search: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/quantum%20psychology
and sure enough, there it was…a pile of stuff to sift through….I am telling you, everything TUMBLRs out eventually.
