So I am currently in the last few weeks of my doctor training (almost a doctor: simultaneously YAY and *terrified face*) and I have to give a presentation on something psychiatry related. Now I figured, an informative talk about Tumblr would be interesting, because there are a lot of psych people on Tumblr. So peeps, tell me, what would you want your psychiatrist to know about Tumblr?
That there is no way to consistently filter or organize the content you see. Its up to other users and third party programmers to help you see or not see anything, and other than that its luck of the draw. Someone you're following for cupcake recipes could post hardcore porn, and youre going to see it, unless they go to the trouble of tagging it and you have whatever they chose to tag it as blacklisted.
The environment around social justice is really fucking toxic. Engaging in the discourse is fucking terrifying, especially if you disagree because there is decent chance you will then be targeted for large scale social ostracization and bullying
some of the good and bad things about internet culture that might not be obvious to someone not in a particular generation, even someone fairly computer-literate (EDIT: if this is a presentation to other students that might not be as helpful, actually) like, the way communities of support kind of self-organize (and also the ways those can go bad, cults of personality, etc.) Online friendships and relationships as valid things (again, both good and bad) I remember a post Luka made (last year...?) where he casually mentioned getting a bunch of anons telling him to kill himself, as a minor but notable part of a pretty bad day, and his therapist was just aghast. Like, the potential scope and severity of online harassment might be worth covering.
it's funny this thread showed up when it did, actually, because tomorrow morning i am planning to give my therapist some breakdowns of why tumblr is so awful, because it's important when taking into account some other stuff about my mental health that i'd like to get into. god have mercy on her..... god have mercy on me
It really depends on who you follow and how strict you are about it. If you follow personal blogs you're going to get a huge mix of things but if you wanted to follow only aesthetic and positivity blogs there's a chance you might not ever see the sj stuff and thus don't know about the toxic culture. I don't know. Like yeah tumblr's sj culture can be pretty fucking toxic but like it's not all bad? And I don't want that to be the first thing my psych thinks off when I talk about it, because I'm afraid they'll tell me to quit when really the only reason I see the toxic shit is because I follow people who like to point out the toxic shit. If I wanted it to my dash could be all memes and fandom with very little negativity.
Through talking with the psychiatrists I have realised that they know very little about social media in general and I am going to have to keep my talk very generic. I only have about twenty minutes as well, which is a Shane, because I think I could have a two hour talk and not have told everyone everything I think they should know. For now I am focusing on what Tumblr is, how it works, and how it is used. and then I will dive into more the positive and negative aspects of Tumblr. More generic really.
I think the following mechanic for dash curation and the community building around specific tags and big name tumblrs is the most important thing I'd want my psych to know imo. The positive and negative aspects of tumblr are outgrowths of that, rather than Unique Tumblr Things That Exist In A Vacuum.
What about how intense and serious it is all the time? There's a lot of surreal humor, but there's never a moment you can be sure you're not about to run into extremely draining political posts. You'll see a post where the fact that the text is in four columns and one line is the joke, and the text is about fat cats being bode, and then the next post will be part of an argument about gay marriage. And the surreal humor can get derailed by SJ in an instant. It's hilarious and the surreal humor is probably more common than the serious political discussion but you can't avoid either one of them.
