©2017 Julian Tavis Dale Burton ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MAKING SPACE ON THE DIGITAL MARGIN: YOUTH FANDOM COMMUNITIES ON TUMBLR AS SPACES FOR MAKING THE SELF AND RE-MAKING SOCIETY By JULIAN TAVIS DALE BURTON A dissertation submitted to The Graduate School – Camden Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Childhood Studies Written under the direction of Meredith Bak & Kate Cairns And approved by _________________________ _________________________ Meredith Bak Kate Cairns _________________________ _________________________ _________________________ Lauren Silver Todd Wolfson John Wall Camden, New Jersey October 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Making Space on the Digital Margin: Youth Fandom Communities on Tumblr as Spaces for Making the Self and Re-Making Society By JULIAN TAVIS DALE BURTON Dissertation directors: Meredith Bak & Kate Cairns The role of online spaces in contemporary youth cultures is an increasingly relevant and vibrant topic of research in a variety of analytical and methodological traditions. This dissertation joins a growing body of work which explores the complex relationship between youth and emerging media through deep interpretive engagement with contextualized questions of meaning and experience. This approach recognizes the diversity of young people's interactions with the digital world and their agency in shaping those interactions. I herein present an ethnographic account of young people who are part of the fandom community on social networking site tumblr, a group united by shared appreciation for books, films, television shows, and other media texts. Their connections run much deeper than these interests, however, as does the meaning their engagement in this space holds for them as individuals and as a community. I explore, in turn, how their practices of friendship and community-building diverge from those expected on more popular social platforms more integrated with offline social life; how they experience and manage "internet privacy" in ways which respond to the specific social pressures they face as young people; their perception and construction of authenticity in online self-representations without explicit ii ties to "verifiable" offline identities; and their approaches to discussing issues of social justice and human rights outside the bounds of conventional politics. I ultimately situate my analysis within a larger context of childhood studies scholarship addressing young people's experiences of and responses to social and cultural marginalization. I argue that this community serves as a space of ambiguity and possibility in which young people can engage in forms of cultural resistance, establishing divergent ways of being better suited to their needs and priorities than those of their offline social worlds. The perspectives and experiences of the young people of fandom tumblr thus provide a window into the broader transformative power of digital youth cultures, encouraging us to consider the myriad ways in which young people use these emerging social spaces to shape their lives, their communities, and their world. iii Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation .................................................................................................................... ii Introduction: Welcome to Tumblr ....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Methodology and Approach ........................................................................................... 28 Chapter 2: Building Community .......................................................................................................... 56 Chapter 3: Managing Privacy ................................................................................................................ 94 Chapter 4: Constructing Authenticity ............................................................................................ 131 Chapter 5: Reconstituting Politics ................................................................................................... 166 Conclusion: Tumblr and Cultural Resistance .............................................................................. 208 Appendix 1: Glossary ............................................................................................................................ 219 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................................. 221 Curriculum Vitae ..................................................................................................................................... 235 iv 1 Introduction: Welcome to Tumblr Thomas Edison was a Witch In late 2013, a user posted an image to their tumblr1 blog of a "texting mitt" – a U- shaped, two-handed "glove" with a transparent window designed to allow a smartphone to be used in harsh weather without exposing the device to snow or the user's hands to cold. "Meanwhile in Canada," the caption read: "behold the texting mitt, a sign of how low we have sunk." Other users were more appreciative of the idea. "Sometimes you do need your phone while walking outside, whether for light or communication or directions," argued one commenter; "I've needed to text people while outside several times this week I'd rather not literally risk frostbite to do it" added another. A third was less interested in debating the specific innovation at hand than in criticizing the broad narrative of technology and social decay: "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch". Several other users went on to express their appreciation for this particular turn of phrase. One even used a printing company's website to generate an image, seen in Figure 1, of a stock photography model wearing a T-shirt featuring the comment. This exchange would go on to be liked and shared by other users nearly 200,000 times. The phrase "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch" and the T-shirt image itself would eventually become well-known references within the tumblr community, used in reaction to statements and viewpoints seen as technophobic or needlessly critical of change. 1 Although tumblr's staff and corporate ownership spell the platform's name "Tumblr", most users omit the capitalization in everyday discussion of the site. I have elected to follow this convention outside of any direct quotes which maintain the capital T. 2 Of the 27 tumblr users I interviewed for this project, two referenced this phrase during our conversations. Each of the resulting exchanges spoke to questions at the heart of this project. Hazelnutcorgi2, a 20-year-old media anthropology student who would become one of my key connections in the tumblr community, invoked this reference while discussing attitudes toward social media, to illustrate her feeling that many people are overly willing to criticize and dismiss spaces like tumblr simply because they are new and different, without appreciating their benefits. She made this point in a general sense, but also spoke to what tumblr offers – in terms of both its technological affordances and its community – that other social platforms do not. As I remarked to her at the time, this put me in mind of the interest I had in framing online communities as deeply contextualized, and studying young people's engagement with tumblr not as representative of larger relationships between youth and emerging technology, but in terms of the particular meaning and value they found in this community. Nicewerewolf, another undergraduate student and the first tumblr user I interviewed in my research, related the "thomas edison was a witch" phrase specifically to ageist discourses which paint social change as frivolous and degenerative when it is associated with youth. She spoke of tumblr as a space where young people defy stereotypes of disengagement, and work to help one another and to improve their world. At one point, she referenced the James Bond character Q, recently recast as a man much younger than Bond himself, who based on his age was initially met with suspicion by other characters regarding his expertise and ability to contribute. Much of this conversation brought to mind my interest in young tumblr users' engagement, through fandom and through tumblr, in discourses of political and social significance in which young people are often silenced or 2 Unless otherwise noted, all urls (screennames) in this dissertation are pseudonyms. Chapter 1, which discusses my research methodology, goes into more detail on how and why these are assigned. 3 made unwelcome – the analysis of which was the most clearly defined research goal I had when I began this project. However, nicewerewolf also approached this topic in a way which defied strict categorization, mixing notions of explicit pushback against ageist norms and ideologies with talk of tumblr as a space of identity building and interpersonal support. These conversations, the popularity of the "thomas edison was a witch" reference, and the more generalized positivity I have observed among tumblr users about technological and social change – often in the context of perceived opposition from older generations – have all guided the analysis of the tumblr community and young people's experiences thereof which forms the basis of this dissertation. My initial questions of contextualized