Cultural texts don’t exist in a vacuum (Van Luyn, 2013).
Neither do the hundreds of thousands of post on tumblr’s micro-blogging
website. As argued by Forshaw (2013), ‘cultural texts are often appreciated
because of the way their producer has used the formal constructions of the
genre to achieve a particular effect’. On tumblr, I chose to like, follow and
re-blog posts (a relatively new cultural text) that I appreciate for their
clever, satirical or enlightening qualities. For anyone with the time or the
care who has viewed my tumblr profile would understand. Alas, if you have
not it features such texts as Alt-J songs
or remixes, photography or illustrations by artists or simply a quote to get
through the day. In effect, tumblr is a melting pot of cultural texts that
‘shape the [digital] universe of discourse’ (Forshaw, 2013) and largely shape
my own ways of viewing the world from the cyber sphere of the World Wide Web.
Given the pervasive nature of the internet in its ability to
infiltrate all facets of modern life, online texts are too, shaped by the
dominant genres privileged in the content we view. Given ‘how [I] view,
interpret and understand the world’ around
me as been largely shaped by what I have seen in the media, read in a
book or heard on the radio (Van Luyn, 2013), it is my belief these discourses
or organized structures of meaning (Forshaw, 2013) have translated across to my
online experience but, through the websites I chose to view or the tumblr blogs
I search, I have the ability to be exposed to content that may challenge or
endorse the dominant discourses. In this sense, generic conventions of texts
such as thematic structure, a structure of implication, rhetorical function and
frame may appear to some extent on tumblr but its written behaviour is
uninhibited with set conventions. Alas, if Ralph Waldo Emerson had had a tumblr profile, he would have
accomplished serious “street cred” by being himself in an online world that’s
constantly trying to shape who you are and how you view the world around you.
APA Refernce List:
Van Luyn, A. (2013). Lecture Notes retrieved from:
Forshaw, J. (2013). Identified in lecture Notes retrieved from:
Image Reference List:
Emmerson, R.W. (2013) posted on BrainyQuote:
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