I haz tumblr.

03/12/09

I haz tumblr.

I don’t know whether I’ll use it yet. What do other people use it for?

From the pages of harkaway.tumblr.com -

Pootwattle: post-human, post-Turing

Pootwattle writes: “The logic of the culture industry reinvents itself as the internal structure of an anthropocentric history.”

Which is almost certainly true, although at the same time there’s plenty to argue with. The thing is, Pootwattle is a random sentence generator. So does this demonstrate that meaning lies in the mind of the reader/critic, or that academic work is often utterly meaningless?

Even more fun: I could have a dialogue with Pootwattle almost as readily as with a human academic; does this mean he passes the Turing test, or that the mode of academic discourse fails it?

4 Comments to “I haz tumblr.”

  • Vincent Eaton said on December 4th, 2009:

    I’ve been seeing tumblr popping up more in posts and chats than previously, although it has been around a while. I have done nothing about it, and am curious what it does for you. I’m starting to go into Social Media overdose, because after Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Good Reads and Blog accounts, a writer’s attention needs some filtering and focus. So tumblr away, see whether it builds whatever it is supposed to build.

  • rev said on December 4th, 2009:

    Nick,

    I just use Tumblr to easily accumulate crap that I might or might not need later via firefox. There’s a plugin called Tumblr Post:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5867

    That allows you to pretty easily save something (like scrape some text or pictures) found browsing for easy retrieval later. It even lets you post stuff as private so its your own little private research blog.

    I don’t use any social bits of tumblr though.

    -r

  • Nick Harkaway said on December 5th, 2009:

    Hrrr. I tend to leave tabs open for that. I presently have fifty five open. (File under #reasonsHarkawaycannotuseWindows and #notveryinteresting.)

  • Darian said on December 12th, 2009:

    tumblr can be a pretty fun site if you’re following the right blogs. Then again, I kind of have ADD and want to see everything from C.S Lewis quotes, lolcats, to hipster photography on my dashboard.

Add your comment: