Tumblr Is Killing Me

Tumblr is slowly giving me a severe case of ADD.  For the uninitiated, Tumblr is a social media site that allows short-form blogging.  What that basically means is from one central hub you can follow a litany of blogs that arouse your curiosity, with those blogs’ updates being posted in a newsfeed like fashion to your own blog, from which you can re-blog posts you like for your own followers to see.  In a nutshell it’s Facebook with more pictures (good ones) and information you actually care about, and less pictures from last night that you’d rather forget and repetitive, attention hungry status.  Tumblr gives users the ultimate freedom to explore the world around us from a computer.  Looking at my own, I follow upwards of 300 blogs on every topic imaginable.  “The final sentence” is a blog dedicated to the last line of every literary work under the sun.  “Get Out Of Here, Carl!” is dedicated to what is probably everyone’s least favorite character on AMC’s “The Walking Dead”, Carl, getting into situations he shouldn’t be in by stumbling into shots from other shows and films.  “On the Bro’d” claims to be retelling every sentence of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” for bros.  And “Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time” is dedicated, to, well, “Adventure Time”.  These don’t even scratch the surface of micro-blogs on Tumblr.  There are ones dedicated to food, to architecture, to the latest news in the science community and to music.  Not to mention the obvious choice for a blog: sex.  There are tons of those, too.  There’s a blog dedicated to reposting the same picture of Full House’s Dave Coulier every day (ironically titled “The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day”).

It’s hard for me to find things I dislike about Tumblr, because it’s such an awesome way to waste time.  But that’s the problem.  Tumblr makes it too easy to switch topics; to get my fill of what interests me and move on to the next topic that, more often than not, will be something totally unrelated.  I can see how this can be a problem in the context of a day to day life.  How can I focus on the task at hand when my mind is already yearning to move on to the next task?  But at the same time I see it as taking little nibbles instead of a full bite.  Sure a full bite will fill you up more, but I’d rather take little nibbles of a variety of things and get full of a little bit of everything.

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