#decontextualization

Alexei Sisulu Abrahams in +972 Magazine. How the news cycle misses the predominant violence in Israel-Palestine

Adam Niklewicz Monument to Borscht, 2009. plate, spoons, borscht

persevering

Right now, we get to see the top N inches/pixels/whatever-measurement-is-relevant of a post (which is likely mostly/only the OP, and maybe not even all of the OP at that)…and the tags of the person who last reblogged it.

It feels entirely decontextualized—especially if the person who last reblogged it added text/images/etc in their reblog.

Moreover, if it’s a post/reblog chain that has been repeatedly reblogged—for instance, you and some friends are having a conversation about something via reblogs, or it’s one of those evergreen posts—you have no way of seeing what’s important about the reblog, what’s new (if anything) in this latest reblog. All you see is the same N inches of the original post—and you have to expand the entire thing and scroll all the way through to the end to see if there’s anything new.

What tumblr really should do is what we’ve done on the Mac for decades with long filenames and window titles…middle-truncate.

Show us the OP’s banner and the start of their post, maybe 50% N for the original/initial posts, and then show us the banner of the person who last reblogged it* and the start of that post for the last 50% N, and then finally the tags of the person who last reblogged.

A) If the post of the person who last reblogged** fits entirely within that final 50% N (or whatever the proportion might be), show the “Expand” overlay directly above the “end” of first 50% N portion of the reblog chain.

B) If the post of the person who last reblogged** does not fit entirely within that final 50% N, then show the “Expand” overlay over the “end” of the final 50% N post, wherever that falls in the final post.

In Scenario B, there might be reason to use two different “Expand” overlays—though some usability testing is needed. But the overlay positioned as described in Scenario B could function only to expand that final post in the chain (perhaps renamed “Expand This” or “Expand Post” or even “Expand Final Post”/“Expand Last Post”), while the additional overlay—positioned as described in Scenario A, but named instead “Expand All” to clearly differentiate its behavior—expands the entire reblog chain in one click like the current “Expand” overlay does.

I don’t know how widely useful this “alternate Scenario B interface” might be, or how confusing…for me, it would be useful in those ongoing conversation reblogs where I know the full chain and context already and want only to see the latest addition (final post), but would probably be less useful for the evergreen reblogs. But it felt like something worth thinking through and writing out.

And maybe the whole thing turns out to be more confusing than the current experience? But I do think it’s hard to make what we have now worse, particularly because of the decontextualization problem.

* Unless the person who last reblogged the post only added tags, in which case show the previous reblogger’s banner and start of their post instead.

** Or the last person to add a new post to the reblog chain, if the last person to reblog added nothing or only tags.

There are a number of threads to the piece—as there were a number of trends in the milieu surrounding fanfic this year—including some of the things around attention spans and whatnot that @unsiredtribrid and I have chatted about this year.

One of the themes that really stuck out to me, though, was the whole notion of decontextualization, of all the ways that fandom (as in “being a fan of a piece of media”) is being removed from fanfic.

As my acquaintance’s recommendation for the article said, …

"In the seventies, women artists reclaiming the Goddess were looking for a unity beyond the pluralism of culturally specific symbols. It was important to them to learn that Goddesses once existed everywhere, and that their presence tended, on the whole, to give women higher status in their societies. At the time, feminists did not realize that this retrieval of a worldwide Goddess civilization was largely being done by white, middle-class women for the sake of what some have called an "essentialist" theory until it was pointed out to them."

Although Mendieta was sympathetic with this movement's goals, she distanced herself from what she called "white feminism" and the interests in the body, goddess culture, and the earth maintained by her white colleagues. Mendieta did express an interest in the earth as goddess, leading Orenstein, along with other writers such as Christine Poggi, Monica Sjōō, and Barbara Mor, to see her art as evidence of a growing trend among early second wave feminists to find empowerment in primordial female archetypes. But what Orenstein and the other white critics overlook is the extent to which Mendieta's notion of the earth as goddess was culled from her knowledge of Santeria and her readings about the beliefs of the Taino. Not recognizing the critical difference between their own and Mendieta's fascination with the earth, they appropriate Mendieta to a white goddess model and dis-locate her understanding of the earth from its origins in specific Cuban cultural traditions. It is difficult not to read this dis-location as a "whitening" of the image of the earth goddess, as a way of purifying it of its roots in African and indigenous cultures.