In a fast-paced and ever-changing technological world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between our online and offline identities. Nonetheless, creating or establishing an online identity could help people escape a part of themselves that they don't appreciate or don't particularly appreciate in the presence of others. Identity crises are important phases of a growing teenager, so these outlets can often help them discover their interests and teach them to express themselves. Speaking of an identity crisis experience, Tumblr played a huge role in my online education and opened me up to many life paths and thoughts. It allows you to create your own content and interact with other like-minded people in hopes of inspiring others to do the same. Tumblr has and has had the ability to connect individuals as a tool of control for the past decade, and although the hype is slowing down, it is worth showing the world how crucial this microblogging platform has been to our generation in terms of empowerment and freedom. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Tumblr, a popular blogging platform, was founded in 2007 by David Karp. This service allows online users to post short multimedia blogs, follow other blogs, and even engage in discussions with others. Blog hosting websites may date back to the late 1990s, but they have matured considerably since then, along with the blog itself. What makes Tumblr different from other platforms is that it has triggered a sudden increase in confessionals and self-published pieces. In fact, it was purchased by Yahoo in 2013, in an attempt to renew the concept of blogging and present it as a simple and carefree activity. The first group of popular blogging software, including Blogger, EditThisPage, and LiveJournal, made blogging relatively simple, providing a box into which you could type or paste text, along with a "publish" button somewhere nearby to publish it to the sender's public or private public. The second batch of blogging platforms like WordPress mainly helped in creating business websites and product catalogs and could be used on both your own hardware and rented machines. “Tumblelogs” first emerged in 2005 and focused on quick, rapid-fire posting of videos, photos, and snippets of text rather than lengthy prose (The Economist Newspaper, 2013). When Karp founded Tumblr in 2007, he quickly dominated this field and other software within it. According to Tumblr itself, there are currently 488.8 million tumblr blogs. More than 17 million posts have been published today. Per second, as reported by Tech Jury, more than 1,600 posts are published on Tumblr: this amount of time is enough to upload and share more than 8,000 tweets, more than 4,000 Skype calls and almost 1,000 posts on Instagram. It is also available in 18 different languages and is the 51st most visited website in the world. This scope of activity easily makes Tumblr attractive to the big Yahoo looking to make money by advertising on Tumblr pages. To a normal Internet user, Tumblr looks like any journaling site on the web. However, once you sign up for an account, you discover an entire “ecosystem” of blogs as coined by the Economist. You can like posts such as photos, texts and videos, reblog and follow Tumblr blogs. Posts that gain popularity can accumulate thousands to tens of thousands of “notes,” which are short comments, reblogs, and likes. An original post on Tumblr, i.e. one uploaded bya user instead of reblogging, is reblogged about nine times, which means that only 10% of the blog content is original, while the majority are reblogs published by other users. The thing about Tumblr is that you don't need real names; a simple email address is sufficient. Users of the site can present themselves as different personalities across many different blogs if they wanted. Additionally, you can create your own theme, add music, use another preset theme, or edit your own via the html bar provided when editing your page. There are numerous websites that also provide tutorials on how to insert HTML or what specific codes to insert to produce a certain effect or functionality. This allows you to customize everything to your liking, thus increasing your motivation to spend time working on it and perfecting it. This cool resource and feature leveraged by Tumblr still allows and provides space to think, explore, and get inspired. It can also be an easy way to escape any trauma or fuel the need to vent to other Tumblr users by asking for their input on topics of your choosing. Ultimately, it is the perfect platform to find yourself, others and even ideas. As The Economist says, "Tumblr is, in a way, the anti-Facebook: a social network where you don't have to be friends with your mother." More and more blog pages are created every day, often anonymously. More and more people feel the need to be free, play and express themselves; so Tumblr was and is their playground. According to Paper Magazine, this space to experiment “spawned a culture that initially only existed on Tumblr.” Tumblr was created to feel like a club, and it thrives on the small communities it creates: it laughed at non-members, and everything that happened within made those who used the site feel like they were part of something miraculous. It has inspired many to find an interest in social justice and politics, leading conversations to take place on more obvious and traditional platforms such as Twitter and Facebook (Paper Magazine, 2019). As Emma Sarappo writes in Pacific Standard Magazine, "For some, Tumblr was a virtual classroom that exposed users to ideas and opinions they wouldn't normally encounter — or wouldn't normally agree with." Trace Pfaff, a white, gay 21-year-old from Tennessee, recalled in 2018 that before joining the platform, he was a “Republican asshole.” After entering middle school and discovering a whole new world he was missing out on, he found pleasure and knowledge in reading political memes, which in turn helped him discover new liberal ideas he had never encountered before. From Tumblr he understood more about race and what it really means to be white in this day and age. Similarly, Kenny Lu, a 22-year-old from Long Island, said, “Tumblr opened up the world for him.” She noted that Tumblr is very mindful of mental health and noted how users were adept at abolishing the stigma around heavy topics like these. Coming from Asian descent, mental health was not a priority in Kevin's home, in fact it was completely ignored. Tumblr for him was simply an educational platform and allowed him and other students to be more awake and aware of the world and the different perspectives that can be discovered in one place. On December 3, 2018, Tumblr announced that it would ban adult content such as pornography. This was an unusual move for the company because, unlike most social networks, adult sexuality and pornography were considered completely normal, thus creating a friendly community of porn lovers. The ban has raised many questions.
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