Gaining a Critical Voice on Tumblr

• In Event: Voice, Static, and Silence on Tumblr

Abstract

During a 6-year ethnographic study with a community of sexy selfie enthusiasts on Tumblr, I have found that my participants often find a critical, questioning voice through their networked experiences and practices. They use this voice to speak up against, even subvert, different sets of mainstream norms - mostly those reproducing body-normativity, hetero-normativity and patriarchal hegemony. For my informants, this experience is explicitly connected to Tumblr, and does not happen in other mediated or unmediated situations. Relying on a meta analysis of interviews and ethnographic material from 2011 – 2017, this presentation maps (Clarke 2003) why Tumblr and this community are experienced as affording a voice. I argue that this ‘critical voice’ emerges from a three-pronged constellation of socio-technical affordances - (1) platform related affordances; (2) affordances pertaining to identity construction or the sense of self; and (3) those pertaining to the construction and sense of community.

Katrin Tiidenberg, PhD is an Associate Professor of Social Media and Visual Culture at the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School of Tallinn University, Estonia and a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is currently publishing on selfie culture and visual research methods. Her research interests include visual self-presentation, sexuality, gender and normative ideologies as mediated through social media practices and visual culture, and digital research methods and ethics.

Author

• Katrin Tiidenberg, Aarhus University / Tallinn University