Tumblr: Behind the blogger

Tumblr, a blogging website that was created more than six years ago, has developed into a community of people who can express their thoughts and feelings via texts, pictures, and audio or video files. Unfortunately, teenagers especially have developed an addiction to Tumblr, which serves as distraction from schoolwork.

“[Tumblr] provides an open [place] for us to express our feelings, [something that is increasingly] harder and harder to do in real life,” junior Jessica Pederson said. “You also meet new people and learn about their personal experiences.”

While Tumblr is a great pastime, very dedicated users, dubbed “Tumblr famous,” have a more intense experience with the other users. Pedersen was a member of the Tumblr community for eight months before she finally left the site. In that time, she acquired almost 10,000 followers on her blog.

“I had a black and white blog because… I think the photos are so much deeper and [more] beautiful without color; you really see the subjects and their feelings as they are raw, and not overshadowed by color,” Pederson said.

Tumblr also has a function that allows followers to send messages to the Tumblr owner. Bloggers can choose to allow anonymous messages, which are often times considered more fun than receiving a signed one. Many popular blogs, however, become the victims of hate messages, in which the majority originates from jealous, not-so-famous bloggers.

“I deleted [my blog partially] because Tumblr started to change and people got pretty nasty on there,” Pederson said.

Of the 72.1 million “tumblogs” in the database, nearly 50% of the users are under the age of 25, according to Comscore. These users channel the stress in their lives into blogging.

“There are some drawbacks. Tumblr is definitely addicting and you meet some not-so-nice people, but it’s such a great emotional escape,” Pedersen said.