From Fandom to Collaborative Education
Arcosanti, January 2019 (not quite Brutalist, but a beautiful concrete beast nevertheless).
Through my research of Tumblr-centered discourse and theory it became evident that the notion of fandom is prevalent. My initial thought was that this is not the Tumblr I am familiar with - I associated the term fandom with obsessions over TV shows like Dr. Who, the oeuvre of Joss Whedon, or My Little Pony, as well as Comic Con, Gen Con, Dragon Con, and any other nerdy conventions. (No offence to the nerds, I too have periphery nerd interests, I just hadn’t yet associated them with Tumblr). Early in my research I wondered whether I did in fact follow fandoms through Tumblr but simply never thought of them as such, and this was confirmed while reading Annette Koh’s (2020) critical essay of urban-themed Tumblr fandoms:
The concrete behemoths of mid-twentieth-century #Brutalist architecture had Tumblr fan clubs who celebrated the much-maligned buildings as exemplars of design rather than failures of modernism…Niche fandoms found each other and shared their transformative works, what fandom calls the creative adaptation of other people’s published work. There was a Tumblr devoted to redesigning subway maps for greater legibility, which struck me as a kind of fanfiction for public transit. Cartography as art was enthusiastically embraced, with a boomlet in hometown maps constructed from hand-lettered neighborhood names. Maps also rendered unfamiliar cities knowable, the overwhelming massiveness of Moscow or London or Tokyo turned into a friendly tangle of crayon-colored subway lines (pp. 337-338).
It is true, I am a member of the brutalist fandom, I’ve been following architectureofdoom and bauzeitgeist for years. What other fandoms am I a part of? Antique art ephemera, strange compositions, outsider art, demure collage, 60s psych GIFS, old photos of old buildings, retrofuturism, poetic space memes – my fandoms may be less nameable, but they exist, there’s a defined aesthetic connecting me with my followers and those I follow. Not only did I frequent Tumblr to experience ‘a mood’ or the affect created by my highly curated dashboard feed, but also to connect with the feeling of being around people who get it. Without having to ever explicitly state the fact, it felt like I had managed to surround myself with likeminded people in a nebulous world that existed within me, through the internet, and within others as though we connected as a kind of hive mind ruled by twee poetics, light melancholia and beautiful absurdity.
In 2017 Allison McCracken, who has extensively researched Tumblr phenomena and co-edited the 2020 ebook: a tumblr book: platform and cultures, wrote an article that focuses on the “peer education” (p. 151) that the digital platform fosters. My Tumblr participation waned in 2015 as I neared the end of my 20s, yet it seems that just as I left, an increase in collaborative activity, information sharing and circulation began within and amongst Tumblr communities, which mirrored and reverberated off the rising erratic political and social energy that continues today. McCracken sees more in the platform than just a meeting of minds: “For many youth, Tumblr has become an alternative, tuition-free classroom, a powerful site of youth media literacy, identify formation, and political awareness that often reproduces cultural studies methods of media analysis” (p. 152).
The consideration of Tumblr as a vibrant, multimodal digital space of intersecting thoughts, evolving literacies, symbiotic pedagogies and ongoing cultural critiques, evokes the New London Group’s (NLG) call for a redesign of educational approaches. Their collaborative 1996 article, "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies", radically suggests a designer-like approach to the revisioning of teaching methodologies. NLG’s focus was on the notion of multiliteracies, both “to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies... [and to] account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (p 61). Is it possible that Tumblr has organically developed into the kind of pedagogical environment that NLG was envisioning? Not only does the platform allow for the rapid exchange of cultural information, but also supports and fosters various text technologies, while concurrently allows users to design both their outward-facing persona, and their incoming feed of content. NLG further describes their technologically and culturally diverse vision:
A pedagogy of multiliteracies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects… Multiliteracies also creates a different kind of pedagogy, one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes (p. 64).
In a current reality where we are constantly balancing our mindless technological obsessions with news-induced anxiety and wellness sentiments, it’s exciting to see that the space within a social media platform echoes, cultivates and carries forward a radical call for change from our recent past.
Whether used as a “backchannel” (2018, p. 363) within a formal education setting, as Melanie E. S. Kohnen advocates for in "Tumblr Pedagogies", or simply integrated into one’s recreational learning routine, Tumblr affords its participants with a space to explore content, learn socially, and connect to other likeminded individuals and their own sense of self.
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