Designing for LGBTQI+ Youth of Color Mental Health: Lessons from Peak Tumblr

• In Event: How to Design Just and Equitable Digital Experiences to Support Adolescent Wellbeing

Abstract

Tumblr, a heavily image-based social network platform that, during its heyday from 2010-2015, had higher levels of user engagement as time spent than any other social media platform and counted over 117 billion posts, was disproportionately favored by queer and trans youth users (Byron et al., 2019). Qualitative and ethnographic accounts suggest that queer and trans youth of color specifically found the platform a vital space to connect, engage, and form identities (Perez, 2012), a key task of adolescence. Yet, the platform has remained drastically understudied, even though emerging research contends that it was –and remains– a vital space for mental health resources and support for young people (Hendry, 2020).

This paper synthesizes and interprets the results of a five-year immersive ethnographic study of queer and queer youth of color on Tumblr through the topics of mental health and human-centered design. It combines and analyzes a multi-modal dataset including qualitative coded analysis of over 1,000 anonymized Tumblr posts; the researcher’s own cyberethnographic field notes from immersive participant observation in this space; and 36 in-depth interviews with 11 queer youth of color participants (ages 18-25). The paper presents these findings as a digital design agenda for queer youth of color mental health, as informed by principles of human-centered design and user experience. These include:

• Benevolent Barriers. Tumblr was specifically designed to be difficult to “troll” and harass, as opposed to Twitter, for example. It had no commenting functionality or direct messaging, and interaction was designed for “virtuous cycles” (Proferes & Morrissey, 2020) in which users had to “reblog” any of their comments on others’ posts on their own accounts first.

• Positive Anonymity. Rather than consider anonymity as a blanket negative feature, queer of color users of Tumblr found safety in expressing their sensitive identities and disclosing feelings precisely because it was anonymous and not bounded to offline networks.

• Deep Information Dives. Tumblr’s design also allowed for long text posts, topical information that circulated at scale having to do with mental health resources, structural racism, and understanding gender theory. This educated queer youth of color and signaled that the space did not center whiteness or heterosexuality.

• Easy Multimedia Curation. Tumblr was specifically designed for easy, rapid recirculation of image and video with as few as two clicks, unusual among social media at the time of its founding. This allowed for a robust practice of multimedia curation-as-self-expression –Tumblr as “queer world-building” (Hanckel et al., 2019)– to connect with others on a shared, communal affective level.

Tumblr was certainly not free of harassment or “toxicity”; however, the participants in this study found it much safer than other digital environments for the reasons above. The paper closes with a call to action, asking readers how to take these cues –some of which were deliberate, some of which developed organically or even accidentally– to envision the creation of digital spaces that continue to be supportive of queer of color mental health.

Author

• Alexander Cho, University of California, Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author