My Digital Literacy Narrative
Growing up, I always wanted to be seen as someone cool. It didn’t matter if it was the people at school who thought I was cool or the old ladies at church. If one person said, “Wow Kaylyn, you’re pretty cool,” I was set for a week. For all of middle school and my first year of high school, I was so desperate to be liked by the people who saw me in person. I wanted to be liked by those who could see and hear me, until I discovered the internet. In my sophomore year of high school, I was introduced to the social media platform Tumblr.
Tumblr is a social media platform that is similar to Instagram in the way that users post pictures or text or a combination of the two to get “likes” and shares, called “reblogs.” When I found Tumblr, it was just beginning to gain popularity in the public eye, but had already found its target demographic: young, nerdy teenagers.
As soon as I found Tumblr, the need to be liked in my regular day to day life disappeared. I no longer needed to be liked by the real people around me. Instead, I found the validation and acceptance of these people on Tumblr, and something clicked. I found a community on the internet that gave me triple the dopamine rush that being liked in “real life” gave me. I was obsessed with the people that I found there, and I had to be liked by them, no matter the cost.
Many a sleepless night was spent texting and blogging with friends that I had met on the internet. I was connecting with them through Tumblr or any other messaging app that I could find to talk to these newfound friends. “Internet friends” is a fairly recent concept, it being a classification of friends that are solely from the internet. Most people never even meet their internet friends. I haven’t met any of mine. But that doesn’t make them any less valid. I know my internet friend’s lives deeply and personally, my friend RJ has been working full time as a nursing home assistant in England and is saving up money to move to the states. We know each other’s lives, possibly in a more intimate way than most people in real life do.
I learned a lot from Tumblr, especially about memes. Meme culture was a different type of humor on Tumblr. Most memes that I see now in my everyday life I had seen an origin of some sort on Tumblr. I had watched lolcat’s grow into the cat TikTok videos that we see. I remember seeing the beginnings of T-posing and planking. I learned meme culture from a really young age, and it solidified my sense of humor into something that most people don’t get, but that those who I have made a close-knit real-life friend group understand.
Growing up on the internet was interesting, because it gave me a new perspective on what was going on in the world. Never before had I thought about what was going on outside my town or outside my own personal bubble. I hadn’t ever thought about problems with the world that didn’t directly affect me. However, when I started getting more and more involved online, I learned a lot about breaking news or world events that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. I learned about debating people, especially how to be disrespectful while doing so. I remember reading on Tumblr about the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, and I remember feeling the switch flip in my head when I understood that there were people out there that felt the same kind of anger and frustration that I felt as well.
Tumblr has had the most impact on my life as a digital platform. I found a community among people who were online with me and found acceptance and love there. Though I don’t crave the attention and desperation to be loved anymore, I still find myself a little excited to see if people are still interested in what I have to say at all. I know that some of the people I talked to back then are no longer my friends and no longer on that platform, but nobody will be able to take away the memories we made together. Even now, when I log on to Tumblr I remember all the things that I used to do and the people I knew and smile.