On Blogging, Tumblr, and Being that Elusive "Real Writer"

I want to change my position on Tumblr being a poor platform for SJ blogging. I follow a lot of social justice bloggers who use Tumblr as their primary blog platform, or as an auxiliary to a more conventional blog, and I enjoy the casualness and sense of community it can provide. Is it the best platform for longer, more personal posts? Maybe not, but there's no real reason why it can't be used as traditional blogging platform.

Sweetney, a blogger whose site I've been reading for a few years now, wrote about her reluctance to embrace Tumblr for some of those reasons. As someone who's been blogging in some capacity for almost as long, I want to agree with her, but I can't help but draw parallels between long-time bloggers and the relatively newer trend of microblogging, and recent discussions of the "death of print."

And the simplicity and ease of that approach, the No Mix No Mess No Bother-ness of content aggregation over content production, is without question a large part of why so many people are doing it instead of writing these days. To click a button on articles and posts by other writers and simply point people to them – sometimes with a quick, pithy aside-like accompanying statement or description, but sometimes without even that – is an efficient way to create a presence online without actually creating anything.

I penned a diary-type blog for a few years. I was new to blogging and had few references aside from a handful of personal bloggers I knew. I aped that style, gained a few readers, and felt like a huge fraud. I wasn't creating anything. I found out that I was pretty good at aggregating content, linking to other bloggers, and yes, even adding some "pithy commentary" when necessary. I'm kind of like the patients in Awakenings: I only react when the ball is thrown right to me. There are a lot of people who use Tumblr that way, and it provides a service. A lot of early blogs, before there was even a name for it, were link-logs of sorts.

Another reason this kind of thinking makes me uncomfortable: it veers a little too closely to suggesting that one isn't a "real writer" (creating something) by providing pithy commentary alone. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and commentary can be more insightful than the original piece, and is often a springboard for discussion. I know that's not what's entirely implied here, but speaking as someone who has never been confident in her writing skills, I like having a place where I can "try out" ideas before writing something more substantial. By that logic, Tumblr has made me a better writer.