![]() And this is double fold for youth who are already marginalized.Īs Stefanie Duguay, assistant professor of Communications at Concordia explained to The CBC about LGBTQ youth Tumblr use, “They share GIFs and videos and content around queer celebrities, queer characters, and fanfiction,” Duguay explained. Your Tumblr was definitely not something you shared with anyone.” She continued, “Yet, there was strangely a big sense of community.”Ĭommunity-making on sites like Tumblr can be invaluable in helping young people through their search for identity. While it wasn’t always perfect (I’m looking at you, #thinspo), overall, this caused Tumblr to become a safe space for many young people in the early 2010s.Īs one Concordia student describes, “All the fangirling, aesthetic stock images and memes were incredibly private. ![]() This affordance, mixed with the fairly low median age of users, and possibility for anonymity, led to users sharing a lot more personal information than they would on other platforms. ![]() Being more of a microblogging site than a traditional social media, users were encouraged to publish long posts and personalize their blog’s design. While any media you consume on a regular basis through your tween and teen years is likely to shape you in some way, Tumblr was uniquely good at fostering a community environment. We’re nowhere near the 20-year nostalgia cycle yet, so there must be something special about that time, or our current time, that holds special significance.įor a lot of Zillennials, Tumblr wasn’t just an aesthetic, it was a formative part of their adolescence. Yet, that alone can’t explain its resurgence in recent months. In terms of 2010s fashion, this aesthetic was far from the worst thing in memory. On the music front, in 2014, I, like my fellow Tumblr teens, was listening to Lana Del Rey, Arctic Monkeys, The 1975, and Grimes, because the songs on your iPod Touch were integral to the maintenance of the aesthetic. Now, feed that through the hyper-visual medium of Tumblr and you’ve got yourself countless images of teens in jelly sandals, ripped tights under denim shorts and choker necklaces posing with polaroid cameras, holding up records, or, most commonly, smoking cigarettes. In the 2010s, elder millennials were nostalgic for their youth in the 1990s, and that nostalgia trickled into the style and media of the day. If you didn’t have the (dis)pleasure of living your early teens predominantly online, I can try my best to explain the early 2010s Tumblr aesthetic, often dubbed “ soft grunge.” While the look had little in common with the 90s subculture it got its name from, other than the mere existence of flannel shirts, it could be seen as the product of the 20-year cycle of fashion. This burst of nostalgia came fast and hard, but it hasn’t even been that long since us “Zillennials” were spending our days scrolling down our dashboards. Recently, a lot of people all over the internet have been reliving a certain 2011–2015 subculture that revolved specifically around the website Tumblr. Scrolling through the replies, you see that the aesthetics, music and products from your teen years are all coming back into style. Suddenly a post comes up that stops you in your tracks and drags you right back into your adolescence with a wave of nostalgia. Imagine you’re mindlessly scrolling through Twitter, as we all seem to be doing more and more these days, passively reading through job announcements, middling “hot takes” and COVID-19 stats. All over social media, people are reminiscing over their former Tumblr kid selves
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