'public' vs 'private' on tumblr
increasingly, i am running into the following viewpoint: that all posts people make are, by default, open to the public and available to be commented on by strangers, regardless of stated wishes in tags, readmores,…
Back in 2013, some tumblr users saw aspects of the private vs public debate as a holdover from the days of LJ/DW where we had better privacy controls. Has that changed? The majority of tumblr users have no exposure to the LJ blogging world, so what cultural expectations are they carrying into tumblr today? And are they doing a better or worse job of distinguishing their expectations and assumptions from the reality of tumblr (and online life).
sections below….
“…..we can try as hard as they like to map LJ/DW fannish norms onto tumblr, but tumblr is a functionally distinct medium with no actual privacy controls and we lose sight of that to our peril. [we need to] recognize how quickly tumblr allows (and, indeed, encourages) the message to be separated from the messenger. if you have been on tumblr for any length of time, i guarantee that you have reblogged something the OP never intended for you to see or comment on. perhaps it was a silly text post, or perhaps it already had a billion notes, or perhaps it never occurred to you that the OP would mind, or perhaps it did occur to you but you just ~felt sure~ that they wouldn’t really care, but the principle of the things remains the same! and it strains credulity to think that we can have our cake (sharing the content of strangers while rarely, if ever, going to the source to see if they want it shared) and eat it, too (expect strangers to respect our right to limit access to our content). again, my point here is not “and therefore everyone has the moral right to opine on your real life posts” but that we have to be honest about the community standards of behavior we are already upholding if we hope to effectively change any of them.
so i suppose my feeling is: i will continue to do my best to respect your wishes regarding your content. i will continue to not follow people who purposefully disrespect the wishes of others regarding their content. but i am deeply resistant to framing this issue in terms of “private conversations” or “strangers eavesdropping” or anything else that proceeds from a fanciful, nostalgic re-imagining of the actual medium we have chosen to use. we all deserve a more serious conversation than that about boundaries and respect on tumblr.”