Brevity is the soul of microblogging

Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016

Brevity is the soul of microblogging

Joe Hanson

When people think of blogging, they may think of thousands of words on a single page. But there’s a lot to be said for keeping it short. Joe Hanson, the mind behind the popular YouTube and Tumblr series It’s Okay To Be Smart, describes the important role that microblogs can play in your science communication efforts.

You might be a Whovian, a Nerdfighter, or a Potterhead. Perhaps you enjoy Garfield comics without Garfield, or when Family Circus is captioned with quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche. Heck, maybe you just want to look at the same picture of Full House actor Dave Coulier every day.

These are all fandoms, and they all live on microblogs like Tumblr.

A fandom is a community of cultural camaraderie driven by shared interests. Today microblogs are the meeting places where these groups share those interests, whether mainstream or ridiculously obscure. Like many communities, fandoms use a shared language to identify insiders, a shorthand syntax where one “ships” people, not parcels, and where passionate debates occur over the correct pronunciation of “GIF.” And above all else, the primary currency is the “share.”

Microblogs are invaluable to pop culture, and perfect for a teenager’s thought diary, but they are still rarely used for science communication. On its own, a microblog isn’t best suited for carrying out a broad, institutional science communication effort. But they can be important parts of those larger efforts, useful tools for doing a very particular kind of science communication directed at a very particular audience. Current users of microblog platforms are young, spend a lot of time online, are well-educated, and are fairly evenly split between males and females.1 Tumblr holds a reputation for engaging groups typically underrepresented in science, especially women, racial minorities, and people identifying as LGBTQ. Tumblr users are the proverbial “key demographic,” that is, replete with important science fandoms waiting to be noticed.

Microblogs trace their popularity to ease of use. If we do a basic etymological dissection, “microblogging” is really just blogging, only divided into smaller units of content, delivered and consumed in lesser units of time. When compared with its “macroblogging” relatives, microblogging distinguishes itself in another important way. It has become a “broadcasting” medium.

Today, almost without exception, microblogging platforms integrate the core elements of social networks into their architecture, most notably the “follow,” “like,” and “share” actions. Indeed, it’s becoming difficult to see where something stops being a micro-blogging platform and becomes a social network, and vice versa.

Microblogging could be defined, if we’re forced to do so, as the blog, distilled to its individually shareable units (items such as photos, videos, links, and bits of text) and broadcast throughout a social network. Twitter fits that definition, and is often referred to as a microblogging platform. But I’ve chosen to omit it from this discussion, because it has evolved into a broadcast medium in a class of its own. Microblogging, then, is social blogging.

As it exists today, microblogging is dominated by one platform: Tumblr. Other platforms exist, notably Pinterest, but Tumblr’s diverse content and richer history make it an ample test case. We can understand a great deal about Tumblr’s utility, and therefore the more general usefulness of microblogging, by studying its genesis.

Microblogging-like activity traces back in one form or another to the earliest days of the World Wide Web, and probably even before that. In 2005, though, then-seventeen-year-old Christian Neukirchen’s anarchaia.org was the first site described, rather presciently, as a “tumblelog.” It was so named because a reader could quickly “tumble” down the page, a column stacked in reverse chronological order filled with links, images, and other short, free-form content.2 Later that year, blogger Jason Kottke described the new tumblelogs as “a quick and dirty stream of consciousness” and “really just a way to quickly publish the ’stuff’ that you run across every day on the web.”3

David Karp, with the help of Marco Arment (later of Instapaper fame), built and launched the first tumblelogging platform in 2007. Tumblr was based on Marcel Molina’s hand-coded tumblelog Projectionist (http://project.ioni.st), which set the style, organization, and format for nearly every tumblelog that came after it. In the modern tumblelog format, different types of content are displayed in different ways, and the focus of a post is shifted from standard blocks of original text to individual content units: links, snippets of text, images, videos, or even audio. Today, much like Kleenex or Band-Aids, these tumblelogs have become so eponymous with the platform that hosts them that we simply call them “tumblrs.”

The evolution of Tumblr and other microblogs seems in no small part to be a reaction to traditional blogs’ magazine-like and text-heavy format. Often only a small portion of the content on most Tumblrs is created by the person who runs the Tumblr. Back in 2005, Kottke described tumblelogging as feeling closer to editing and less like writing or punditry. David Karp said one of his primary motivations for starting Tumblr was that he “doesn’t enjoy writing.”4 Tumblr, and microblogging in general, seem to have made “curation” the name of the game.

Much later, flagship social networks like Facebook and Google+ integrated microblogging into their platforms. What is a status update, or link with comment, if not a microblog post?

Tumblr is good at communicating any media or content, be it science, nail art, or Sherlock fan fiction. Tumblr is a campground where passionate people reside, and it succeeds in its ability to unite them around very specific campfires to tell very concise campfire stories. Quick, targeted, and passionate.

That being said, there are certain best practices and particular types of media that flourish on Tumblr. But to understand what and why, we have to pin Tumblr to the surgical tray and do a bit of dissection.

Tumblr is a beast with two faces. One is a face that it shows to the outside world: a standard-format web page that resides at a URL and can be customized with all of the standard HTML trappings, albeit within certain limits imposed by the platform. Everyone who signs up for Tumblr has a public blog, whether or not they choose to put anything on it, but that’s not really Tumblr any more than a person’s Twitter profile page “is” Twitter. Tumblr’s true face is the Dashboard.

Only users who are signed up for and signed in to Tumblr can see the Dashboard. Prominently displayed at the top are the seven types of posts: text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video. Clicking one brings up a post editor specifically tailored to that type of content. Beneath that is the post feed, which serves up content in reverse chronological order from all the other Tumblr pages the user “follows.” Alongside the post feed is an information panel containing many standard blog tools, including a summary of recent activity on a user’s posts, navigation to other Tumblr blogs run by the same user (Tumblr offers multi-author support), the queue of scheduled posts, and a list of followers.

This is the only place that a follower count appears on Tumblr. Unlike on Twitter or Facebook or Google+, Tumblr follower counts are not publicly viewable. This was a deliberate decision on Karp’s part. He called such markers of social popularity “really gross.”5 This content-over-fame vibe permeates the network. Perhaps more than on any platform, institutions and brands that want to communicate science must act and speak as part of the community, not down to it.

Photo posts are by far the most popular, with one analysis showing that photos made up 83 percent of posts.6 Multi-photo posts can be organized in a number of ways. There is also native support for animated GIFs, and Tumblr is primarily responsible for the resurgence of this file format.

Tumblr’s design and architecture promote positive interaction among its users, from the choice of a heart icon to denote a “like” to the fact that instead of commenting on a post, users must reblog it to their own pages, which means that all comments will also reside on their pages and become attached to their identities. This strikes me as one of the most important, yet oft-overlooked aspects of the Tumblr microblogging experience, and it maximizes, although does not guarantee, positivity.

The content must be interesting, but interesting content is only part of the recipe. More importantly, microblogging for science requires both effective use of the platform’s design and molding the content to the desires and tendencies of the audience. Content, like a Tumblr user, must be quick, targeted, and passionate.

Images are more shareable than text, and they make people pause, if just for a moment. This is not to say that images carry more significance, but the intellectual value of a long text post must be weighed against the very different sort of impact that an image post can have. On Tumblr, even text converted into an image has more potential impact than text alone. The once-maligned GIF format has become an art form unto itself, part irony and part awesome. There’s something about a moving, silent image, absorbed in mere seconds and with no need for reader intervention, that just plain works.

If you want a post to be seen, liked, and shared, you must tag it. Tumblr’s tagging feature is its greatest discovery tool. Posts are accompanied by hashtag-like tags inserted by the user, some broad (like “science”) and some oddly specific (like “cats in spacesuits”). On Tumblr, any tag can be tracked, or subscribed to, allowing a user to see any post on Tumblr containing that tag. Popular tags like “science” have tag editors chosen from the Tumblr community that can “feature” a post on the larger, curated tag pages, driving traffic and increasing engagement. Untagged posts are invisible posts.

There are several great science Tumblrs that you can learn from. Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics (http://fuckyeahfluiddynamics.tumblr.com) serves up GIFs, short videos, and photos illustrating principles of fluid dynamics. Concise explanations are attached below, but are secondary to the truly shareable item: the image or video.

Explore.noodle.org serves up mostly visual fare in subjects ranging from literature to history to science, utilizing Tumblr’s powerful tagging system both to organize the posts on the public-facing page, and to target content to Tumblr’s countless communities of shared interests.

Brookhaven National Labs runs an institutional microblog (http://brookhavenlab.tumblr.com) that features odd historical archives as well as notable videos and images relating to current Brookhaven research. Skunkbear is a microblog (http://skunkbear.tumblr.com), run by NPR’s science desk, that publishes original multimedia web journalism specifically produced for Tumblr. On both, posts usually link back to the brand or institute’s larger website, where readers can encounter more traditional science communications like press releases and feature journalism.

The ease of sharing on platforms like Tumblr has turned information consumers into curators, with creators often suffering financially. While Tumblr has integrated many elements into its platform to aid in attribution and linking back to the original content creators, the responsibility to engage in these best practices ultimately rests on the shoulders of the end user. Even a cursory tour through your typical Tumblr page indicates that attribution behavior has much room for improvement. But free sharing of media is a cornerstone of the social web, and the protection of intellectual property must find a way to coexist with our sharing culture, hopefully through education and proper behavior on the part of those with influence. The act of curation allows an information consumer to personalize his or her experience, to belong to passionate communities of shared interests with minimal investment of attention. It forces creators to find ways to belong to those communities, rather than to simply deliver content to them. As Tumblr’s Danielle Sterle says, “It’s a magic river of Internet awesome that you have made all for yourself.”7

Tumblr blogs have spawned more than a hundred book deals; musicians have released albums directly to their fans with Tumblr; and photographers, artists, and fashion journalists have used their Tumblr communities to launch many private companies and major brand partnerships.8 Nerdfighters, the fan community based around Hank and John Green’s YouTube projects, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for global charities (or, as its members put it, the Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck, http://www.projectforawesome.com). My own Tumblr, It’s Okay To Be Smart, has allowed me to build a community of hundreds of thousands of followers, to launch a weekly science education video series produced by PBS, and to reach millions of people who wouldn’t usually seek out science in their daily lives.

Like every platform or service in the digital toolbox, Tumblr is a very specific hammer for a very specific kind of nail. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges that science communication faces, but there is also no one kind of audience.

Microblogs may not ever exist as cornerstones of science communication efforts, but they can be an important tool in the creation of science-interested communities. There are few, if any, social media tools today that foster sharing and communicate shared interests as well as Tumblr. The ability of Tumblr users to wear their interests on their digital sleeves—and to share, follow, tag, and curate media based solely on their own interests—gives them a powerful way to break out of the typical top-down, one-way arrangement that exists in science communication and science journalism. Microblogs allow us to go beyond simply allowing audiences to comment and react and review on our turf. They are built on a mode of self-expression that makes the end user a critical piece of the communication process. The memes, subcultures, and styles that exist in these self-sculpted communities give us a new language into which we can translate important science, and a new audience with which to communicate. If we wish to reach these undiscovered and underserved science fans, we should embrace and become part of the fandom.

Joe Hanson, Ph.D., is the creator of the PBS Digital Studios YouTube series and website It’s Okay To Be Smart. He has also written for Scientific American, Nautilus, and Wired, and his writing has been featured in The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing Online.

Joe is based in Austin, Texas. Find him at his website, http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com, or follow him on Twitter, @jtotheizzoe.

Notes

1. Stats obtained from Tumblr, 2013 (personal communication from Tumblr employee).

2. Fernando Alfonso, “The Real Origins of Tumblr,” Daily Dot, May 23, 2013, http://www.dailydot.com/business/origin-tumblr-anarchaia-projectionist-david-karp.

3. Jason Kottke, “Tumblelogs,” Kottke.org, October 19, 2005, http://www.kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs.

4. Erick Schonfeld, “Why David Karp Started Tumblr: Blogs Don’t Work for Most People,” TechCrunch, February 21, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/founder-stories-why-david-karp-started-tumblr-blogs-dont-work-for-most-people.

5. Rob Walker, “Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads without Selling Out?” New York Times, July 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/magazine/can-tumblrs-david-karp-embrace-ads-without-selling-out.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

6. Dan Zarrella, “How to Get More Likes and Comments on Tumblr,” DanZarrella.com, http://danzarrella.com/infographic-how-to-get-more-likes-and-com ments-on-tumblr.html#.

7. “In Conversation with Danielle Sterle,” video, 15:30, from a presentation at Social Data Week on September 20, 2013, posted by Social Data Week, http://fora.tv/2013/09/20/In_Conversation_with_Danielle_Strle_of_Tumblr.

8. “Before the Federal Communications Commission in the Matter of Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet, Comments of Tumblr, Inc.,” Federal Communications Commission, GN Docket 14—28, September 9, 2014, http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment/view?z=pk9t8&id=6018347452.