#desis

How Tumblr Created Aesthetic

Of all the social media sites out there, Tumblr is the least expected to be unfamiliar with the aesthetic, or event the term “aesthetic” in general. In more ways than one, Tumblr birthed the concept of online aesthetics. Older users know that the website was one of the first to be image-centric when it was launched in 2007 (Mirny 2021). The emphasis on imagery as content combined with the utilization of tags called for a culmination of users to curate communities quite literally with the touch of a button (or maybe a few). Using tags to label images are posts makes searching a lot easier, but because Tumblr tags allow so much creative freedom, it can become difficult to describe a community when it consists of so many different ideas and images. Naming an aesthetic “dark academia” is much easier than saying “things that look like Dead Poet’s Society” and hoping for the best. 

In philosophy, aesthetics refers to the principles that govern perceived beauty and artistic taste. Tumblr is no different. The various aesthetics you see such as “basic”, “cottage core”, “retro”, “e-girl”, etc. are all forms of artistic expression that resonate with specific groups of people. Even the aesthetics that are very apparent forms of rebellion against beauty standards have some type of standard themselves to constitute as an aesthetic, such as “goth” and “punk”. Users will create image posts and connect them with their respective tags. Images that users feel make the most sense in the aesthetic receive more notes and reblogs, and reach more users exponentially, while images that don’t cater to the target community tend to dissolve. This system pushes communities to create a concentrated aesthetic that shares a very specific feature. 

When a majority of Tumblr users are young, that no doubt significantly influences what the mainstream aesthetics will look like. 

Though not the majority, a large portion of users consists of people between 15 and 25 years old. People can struggle at any age, of course, but the 10-year period is difficult. Imagine going through physical puberty, immediately followed by emotional puberty. Younger users are more likely to yearn for a sense of community to feel like they belong *somewhere*, meaning that aesthetic communities are bound to be more popular with that demographic: “Access to the public sphere in traditional ways has decreased substantially for youth during the past two decades, while surveillance by parents and institutional authorities has greatly increased. Teens' use of social media is a reflection of their need to find new ways to achieve privacy and assert some control over their personal space” (McCracken 2017). The very need to gain back the control McCracken mentions is reflected in the rise of online aesthetics. It serves as a form of self-expression in a place that the self is otherwise restricted, and users can portray themselves however they see fit. People want to be with others who understand them. But it’s in that sense of community where users can stumble into something that would’ve been better off left alone (this seems to happen so often that the site should be rebranded to Stumblr). 

Romanticizing Mental Illness

***Content Warning: Discussion of eating disorders and self-harm ***

Those familiar with dark academia imagine a flurry of images when they hear the name of the aesthetic. Among those images are primarily scholars. Dark academia concocts a reality where chasing your thirst for knowledge is for your own personal development and enrichment. In the 1989 film Dead Poet’s Society, teacher John Keating tells his students, “We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.” Passion for knowledge is at the core of dark academia, but eventually to a fault. The b-side of the aesthetic includes dark circles and eye bags, madness, and the ever infamous “thinspo”.

Anima Shrestha cites 16-year-old Tumblr user Laura who wishes she could be “mysterious, haunted, fascinating”. The transition from demonizing mental illness in media to desiring it is largely due to the “echo chamber” sites like Tumblr provides (Shrestha 2018). Vulnerable teenagers and young adults will go into Tumblr seeking advice or sympathy and find themselves accidentally caught in a riptide of negative content. Once the algorithm catches onto a user’s preferences, the user will see more of that type of content. Repeating the beautification of mental illness within this closed space may eventually lead to impressionable/vulnerable users to desire mental illness for themselves (Shrestha 2018). Black and white images portraying melancholy and despair remove the very real pain of mental illness and converts the concept into its own aesthetic. This simultaneously harms the people with desire who do not have a disorder and delegitimizes those who do have a disorder. 

The the two most inescapable disorder-based posts on Tumblr are arguably depression and anorexia, especially within dark academia. As mentioned earlier, the core of the dark academia aesthetic is a burning passion for knowledge. This can materialize in the form of a student who stays up for hours on end to research their interests, or an alcoholic professor who is a nihilist because he “just knows too much”. More often than not, “the tortured artist” is the most revered trope: a misunderstood character in pain over the unfair nature of the world; someone who is too intellectually profound for their own wellbeing. Nihilism and depression combine to create this image of superiority because “nobody gets them”. Physically harming and neglecting the self is an integral part of the tortured artist archetype, so it will surely flow over if one embraces the aesthetic wholly. However, how a user connects to this archetype can turn into a “what came first”-type riddle. In the height of Covid-19, students were already at the mercy of academic stress, so it’s not impossible that the tortured artist/scholar serves as a figure of relatability and comfort. In a sense, the character makes the pain feel like it’s all in the name of something greater than we can comprehend, making it worth it. However! Users are still at risk of exacerbating the situation if they stay within the echo chamber.  

On to thinspo: the first time I searched up “Dark Academia” on tumblr I saw an image-post of very thin white women with the tags #an0r3x!a (leetspeak for “anorexia”) and #I will get skinny.

I was horrified - why is it so blatant and so accessible?

Not surprisingly, it’s because we like skinny women. Using the royal we, our online society prefers thinner woman to the point where 97.7% of them were the subject of a photo (Wick and Harriger 2018). I don’t think anyone will fall out of their seat in shock when I say that we still have exceptionally strict beauty standards online for women and femme-presenting people. They are expected to be skinny, hairless, and white (or European-looking at the very least). Placing people with these features on a pedestal further separates people and creates a homogenous community. With dark academia being an aesthetic, it will inevitably prioritize how things (and people) look.

Classism and Racism in Dark Academia

A quick question: did the photo I included at the very top of this post seem out of place? Did anything about it scream “THIS ISN’T DARK ACADEMIA!!!!” ? I’d be surprised if it gave off that impression because most results when searching for “dark academia” show images of preppy-looking students, marble statues, and old European-style architecture. The fashion, architecture, and very interests of dark academia are heavily Eurocentric. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is potentially THE template for the aesthetic, with it’s preparatory school, white students in uniforms, and mystery. 

Is there anything wrong with thinking that Oxford University looks nice and that French seems like an interesting language? Of course not! But the fact that the aesthetic is so blatantly European begs for questioning. 

Dark academia associates itself with decadence, elite scholarship and mysterious prep schools, all of which have been historically exclusive to wealthy white men. With the efforts of British colonialism, nations have been ravaged of their wealth and knowledge, leaving few resources to recuperate in time before Western ideology became the mainstream. Dark academia preserves the past and remains within the aesthetics of 19th and 20th century England and the east coast of the United States. Even the fashion of it is that of the modern-day Tory (wealthy and conservative English people). An overwhelming majority of images with the dark academia tag depict white people, and they are treated as the default. If you want to find traditional/cultural dark academia, you need to specifically search for it, showing us that BIPOC users are not included within the aesthetic normally. 

The lack of BIPOC people within the community reflects the reality of how academia tends to bar People of Color from entering the space, especially women. BIPOC women who do enter the sphere of education face microaggressions and betrayal from colleagues and mentors alike (Marbley et al. 2011). 

The aesthetic contradicts itself because it’s very presence on social media makes it *not* elite, yet somehow it is gatekept. Dark academia prides itself on individuals learning about and embracing culture, but only European cultures and languages are treated as classy. There is nothing inherently white about wanting to chase knowledge, but because of colonization and mainstream Western ideology, non-European cultures are erased and ignored by the aesthetic. 

Poetry and literature from all cultures should be celebrated in the community because it only provides more perspective on how the chaos of the world around us falls into place. Luckily, users are slowly integrating more content that features people of color in dark academia. 

Resources

Marbley, Aretha, Aliza Wong, Sheryl Santos-Hatchett, and Lahib Jaddo. 2011. “Women Faculty of Color: Voices, Gender, and the Expression of Our Multiple Identities within Academia.” Advancing Women in Leadership 31: 166–74. http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/Vol31_2011/marbleyfinal207_31.pdf.

‌McCracken, Allison. 2017. “Tumblr Youth Subcultures and Media Engagement.” Cinema Journal 57 (1): 151–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44867867.pdf.‌

2021. Proquest.com. 2021. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2506736471?parentSessionId=mW4hWlzgSS8EN%2FZpFGJqHDUuHtxx6kwfnPofMsRtdFM%3D&pq-origsite=primo&accountid=9703.

‌“Elsevier Enhanced Reader.” 2017. Elsevier.com. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2017.11.005.‌

“(PDF) Emotion Regulation and the Disappointing Gift Task: Implications for Understanding Children’s Development.” n.d. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Reeya-Patel-7/publication/327321983_Emotion_Regulation_and_The_Disappointing_Gift_Task_Implications_for_Understanding_Children.

“U.S. Tumblr Usage by Age 2020 | Statista.” 2020. Statista. Statista. 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/202359/tumblr-users-demographics/.

‌Jewett, Emily. 2021. “Dark Academia Has a ‘White’ Problem.” Study Breaks. January 18, 2021. https://studybreaks.com/culture/reads/dark-academia-diversity/.‌