Improbable Curators: Analysing Nostalgia, Authorship and Audience on Tumblr Microblogs

Launched in 2007 and already hosting over 250 million blogs, Tumblr is one of the most innovative, flexible and popular microblogging services currently in existence. This chapter examines some of the platform’s unique characteristics, in terms of content (re)production, distribution and curation. Focusing on an emergent community of “nostalgic” users, I show how various types of grassrooted circulatory dynamics challenge the conventional understanding of originality and authorship, as bloggers become creators of digital content repositories. This process not only destabilises the three conventional sites of an image (production, image, audience), but also raises interesting questions with regard to individual agency and creative collaborative practices online. Several examples are put forth, from culinary graphics being hijacked by bloggers from corporate domains, to similar capitalizations of visual symbols derived from the beauty industry.