Bulletin Board Of Social Media

Tumblr: The Bulletin Board of the Social Media Age Bolter and Grusin developed their theory of remediation, in their book of the same title, to explain the ways in which media interact with and influence one another, whether that be presenting the content of older medium in a new one without critique, utilizing aspects previous media to add legitimacy, absorbing the previous media, or simply quoting other works within the same medium. It is the incorporation, representation, or borrowing of aspects of one medium in another medium and it functions on a spectrum from immediacy, in which the medium’s interface is transparent, leaving the user in sole and direct contact with the medium’s content, and hypermediacy, in which the user’s involvement

As Bolter and Grusin explain, hypermediacy is a visual style that, “favors fragmentation” and that, “interactive applications are often grouped under the rubric of hypermedia” (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 31). As an entirely interactive medium, in which viewers are the content creators via posting and there exists, to an extent, a type of personalization that users can manipulate on their personal pages, Tumblr fits the ‘rubric’ of hypermedia. Furthermore, they explain that hypermediacy is to “to create is to rearrange existing forms” (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 39), which creates a “cluttered space [which] makes us aware of the process of construction” (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 38). This is evident in the news feed format employed by Tumblr. The way in which images, videos, articles, texts, and headlines, are strewn together without regard to pattern or theme, while not entirely a ‘cluttered space’ does appear consciously constructed. Because Tumblr employs a dashboard style interface with directory and search bar at the top of the webpage that allows users simple navigation, the platform aligns itself with Bolter and Grusin’s definition of hypermediacy in

In maintaining the hypermediate nature of its predecessors, including Polaroid photographs, the newspaper, and the bulletin board, Tumblr also justifies and legitimizes itself. It does so because it aligns itself with a similar interfacial experience that users have become accustomed to in more established media. Additionally, this hypermediacy, created through the dashboard interface, also helps to make the platform user friendly, helping the platform to fulfill its purpose as an entertaining modern bulletin board, evident in the similar collage nature of the outdated physical platform and the new digital