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Embarrassingly, I owe my formative political education to a website called Tumblr dot com. Although I created my Tumblr in high school for the sole purpose of reblogging random lifestyle imagery, I eventually encountered folks who were really angry about injustices, so-called Social Justice Warriors, or SJWs (although this term now seems to be used almost exclusively by alt-right bullies). A few months into my engagement with radical bloggers, I became skeptical and distrustful of my teachers, parents, and community. Given the conversations I was involved in through my cyber-community, the people in my local community seemed unenlightened and uninitiated.
I immediately recognized this experience in Gergen’s description of how the realities of cyber-communities can destabilize local and communal realities. Gergen explains that “when the local ceases to hold sway [sic], bonds of communal trust are frayed” (232). My activity on Tumblr invested me in cyber-communal realities and frayed my trust in local institutions.
Online activist communities are an interesting case study in cyber-community because they should hypothetically diverge from Gergen’s idea of the “floating world” (235). An online activist community is a “floating world” in the sense that it is concerned with second- and third-order levels of communication (that is, conversations about ideas/concepts, and conversations about those conversations); in another sense, however, activist communities should not “float free” from the dilemmas of everyday life. The removed, absent, super-local discourse should translate into concrete change-making behaviors in local contexts.
Of course, online activist communities are often criticized for their removal from the issues they aim to address. (How does a Facebook profile frame help protect DACAmented people?) Perhaps, as Gergen claims, cyber-communities inherently decenter the local/communal, and thus online activist communities will always face a requisite level of estrangement from “on the ground” realties. Given that social media and cyber communities are such powerful tools for spreading information and building political alliance, however, I don’t see activists turning on Tumblr anytime soon.
Works Cited
Gergen, Kenneth J. “The challenge of absent presence.” Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, edited by James E. Katz and Mark Aakhus, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 227-241.
Posted from Digital Studies by Hannah L.