Rosen's Image

After reading Rosen’s Image Culture, I’m shocked and amazed as to how the media has altered pictures of models or president only to make them look better than before. How the media uses Photoshop so much just to create phony pictures that we see in magazines or on the internet. I could see politics making false campaign pictures just to harass the other opponent so they will get the edge, but knowing that magazine covers or the picture they include are Photoshopped is just wrong. I do indeed love the piece that Rosen wrote about and is telling society how far we have come in the image culture and how much it has changed in the years.

How to: Tumblr

Continuing on the topic that I talked about last week, Tumblr is a somewhat small community in comparison to Facebook. Tumblr is a site where you can choose to be a follower or a person who wants to be followed, kind of like Youtube. To narrow my description of Tumblr, will discuss the terms on how people can follow you.

Extend:

- In a way, Tumblr can be used to expand your well being. Show off your work to people who may not live near you or are interested in your work. It’s kind of like an expansion of a museum or radio.

- Another way to be well known on Tumblr is to have blogs that will make people want to reblog your post. That way people will know who posted it in the first place and may want to follow you. In a way this is like an extension for media, how one famous song can interest a person to buying an album.

Reverse:

- Aside of having many people following you on Tumblr, there will be those that will talk smack about you. They wouldn’t even have to follow you just to say bad things about you. They can make posts about you on Tumblr and it could be spread all over Tumblr itself.

- Another thing to Tumblr is that it can take up a lot of your personal time. When you think you spent about 5 minutes on Tumblr looking at posts from people you follow, you will see that you spent about an hour just by scrolling and laughing at things you see one Tumblr.

Retrieve:

- Since Tumblr is a blogging site, sites like Blogger.com or Kotaku.com is the kind of like the father of Tumblr. Instead of getting information on separate site, Tumblr enhances the form of gathering information.

- Meeting new people is another way people can Tumblr. Since people follow others because of interests, it is just like meeting people at a record store or at the arcade.

Obsolesce:

- In a way, Tumblr replaces diaries or logs. Tumblr can be used to write up someone’s daily life or their feelings. With addition to writing up one’s feeling, it can be shared with followers and get support or share stories with the followers.

- Music is another way Tumblr replaces Youtube, radio, or Music channels. For people who want to get known faster than Youtube, Tumblr is the perfect way to do that since there are many people who listen to music and need a better way to find that music.

Social Connection

"Too many people know too much about each other."
-Marshall McLuhan

Social media sites like Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, and Blogspot are all ways society uses to connect to a bigger community that’s out of their reach. One particular social site I want to talk about is Tumblr. Tumblr is also another blog site, but is seen for a newer generation. This newer generation using Tumblr could be ranged from thirteen year olds to early twenties. It allows this group of people to blog anything they want from written text as if it was a diary to videos to music and to pictures. With the type of blogs I’ve seen on Tumblr, which are called posts, it could reflect to the personality of a person or how the person is feeling at that moment. Tumblr is a unique compared to other blog sites because when people decide to follow you, you have the option to follow them back if you really want to see what type of posts they will make. Meaning they can see what type of posts you make, yet you won’t be able to wee what type of posts they make unless you follow them back. Also, the people you decide to follow is all up to what you see is amusing or which tumbr heads have the same personality as you.

A down side to this all is when someone you don’t like follows you, you can’t take them out of your follower list. Another down side I see is that if you follow hundreds or thousands of people, you will tend to see the same post over and over again which will seem redundant. Also, if you do follow many people, it’s kind of hard to see posts from people you would really want to see posts from like friends or certain tumblr heads.

In a way, I see Tumblr as another great way to keep people connected outside of the walls they live in. in addition, it is a better way to make yourself known without having to seem really annoying.