When I first joined Tumblr, I expected to find a lot of posts related to my favorite TV shows, movies, and books, and I did. But I, like this Tumblr user, also ended up gaining awareness of extremely significant social issues as a result of “social justice bloggers.“ While this term has both positive and negative connotations on Tumblr, in this post I’m going to focus on the positive side.
Although not all Tumblr posts are 100% accurate, and not all online sources can be trusted, several social justice posts have simply made me more aware that certain issues exist when I would not have known about them otherwise. Here is a good example of one social issue those with disabilities face:
The picture leads to a post by Tumblr user neecygrace. Neecygrace’s friend has an invisible illness, or one which is not physically noticeable. This is one of around 30 handwritten notes this user’s friend has received. The writer of the note believed the friend was misusing a handicapped sign simply because the writer could not see any obvious visible handicaps when the woman left her car, such as a wheelchair or a crutch. But invisible illnesses, such as rheumatoid arthritis, are not obvious handicaps. This post was one which educated me on invisible illness, something I had never thought about before.
This somewhat humorous post was taken from the YouTube channel College Humor. Tumblr user jonsnowflakes posted a link to their video “Diet Racism:”
The video is presented in a humorous light, but it is a critical commentary on the more subtle forms of racism in our culture today. This video has over 100,000 notes on Tumblr. Jonsnowflakes’ posted the video and added that “Collegehumors’ new video is on point as always.”
The official Huffington Post Tumblr page also recognizes Tumblr’s attitude toward raising awareness of social issues. The page used GIFs from a video sponsored by FCKH8 to advocate for awareness of racism today, particularly in respect to the issues in Ferguson. Click the post to see the full version with GIFs.
This post is a good example of a news organization using Tumblr’s unique features (such as GIFs) to promote one of their stories as well as recognizing the topics Tumblr users generally care about. Posts updating users on the current situation in Ferguson continue to appear today, a few months after the events occurred.
There are several other examples of Tumblr users positively raising awareness of social issues such as cultural appropriation, feminism, and sexuality. These topics will be discussed in later posts. While social justice bloggers often go too far, as discussed in one of my earlier posts, I do know that I have learned a lot about societal issues from browsing Tumblr of which I would have remained ignorant had I never joined the site.
