Why It Is Not Surprising That There Are Old People On Tumblr, and Why We Are Surprised By It Anyway

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Title:	Why It Is Not Surprising That There Are Old People On Tumblr, and Why We Are Surprised By It Anyway
Creator:	Plaidadder
Date(s):	September 11, 2015
Medium:	Tumblr post
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Topic:
External Links:	"Why It Is Not Surprising..", Archived version
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Why It Is Not Surprising That There Are Old People On Tumblr, and Why We Are Surprised By It Anyway is a post by Plaidadder.

As of September 21, it had 1058 notes.

Some Topics Discussed

• Fan Age and Fandom
• Tumblr
• the then-current topic of "was The X-Files meant for teenagers and not adults, and were people over the age of 21 or so "too old" for fandom?
• history of fannish communication
• how technology has shaped fandom, not the other way around
• fans nostalgic, and not so much, for past communication platforms

The Post

I don’t know how the whole debate about the X-Files’ original demographic got started, so it would be foolish for me to enter into it. But I have been interested to see the information going around about tumblr’s actual demographic breakdown, and to discover that the percentage of people on tumblr under the age of 18 is comparatively small.

I’m 46. I can tell you why I’m on tumblr, and why it makes sense to me that a lot of people in my age range or slightly younger are on it. And yet I too had the impression, when I first signed on, that tumblr was basically a teenagers’ site, and quite frankly felt very weird about that at first. I’m going to talk about what ‘social media’ (we were not calling it that then) was like back in the 1990s when we first started using it, and why I think tumblr replicates some aspects of that experience, and how and why I think tumblr creates the impression that its main demographic is 13-18 year olds. This is all subjective opinion and you don’t have to believe any of it. But you know, old people, we are always trying to share our wisdom. We can’t help it. I know it’s annoying.

In 1993, when I got my first email account, the Interwebs were very different. For instance:

• As adieangel pointed out, most people didn’t have computers in their homes, and those who had computers at home didn’t always have internet connections. The people you ran into online were people who spent time at institutions that had done all that–universities, corporate offices, the military, and so on. Most of the friends I made online at that time were either in school or working desk jobs, many of them secretarial.

• If you wanted to put your content online, as opposed to just circulating it, you basically had to design your own website, which often meant buying your own domain name, etc. For a while there everyone was doing their own coding, so you had to at least learn basic HTML. Pretty soon software companies came up with webpage ‘editors’ that would allow you to do it without the coding, but I’ll tell you, in the early days, it was frustrating as hell, and if you did your own coding you had a lot more control over how the final product worked.

• Sending and downloading attachments was a mysterious and risky process. The development of malicious attachments laden with viruses initially outstripped the IT’s efforts to protect against them.

• Incorporating images into your electronic communication was a huge pain in the ass and almost nobody did it on a regular basis.

• Interacting with people socially online was not hip or cool. People were starting to use “the world wide web” for information–though it required more effort, since the early search engines were nowhere near as comprehensive or as easy to use as the Google–but the prevailing attitude was that if you were making friends online that was because you were incapable of doing it face to face.

• People were far more cautious about sharing private information. One heard the advice “don’t put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want printed out and posted on the bulletin board at work” a lot. I ignored this advice much of the time; but it is true that we mostly tried to camouflage our “real life” identities while interacting online.

So when I first got online, I belonged to some fan listservs (a listserv is basically a closed email distribution list to which you have to subscribe) under a pseudonym. On the old listservs, everyone saw everyone else’s messages all the time. In the bad old days, there was no way to block content you didn’t want to see, or filter out people you didn’t want to hear from. As a result, there was a lot of flaming, and a lot of painful arguments about whether X or Y or Z ought to be expelled from the community for being an asshole. It used to drive me crazy that people couldn’t just delete messages that they knew were going to piss them off. If you don’t like X, then don’t read her posts, we would say. There’s a reason God made the delete button, we would say. And it was useless. For a lot of people, just knowing that there was someone they didn’t like, or content that made them angry, in their space was so enraging or upsetting that they couldn’t ignore it. I resigned from a feminist online community that I had helped create over this issue. We had some members who were using the feminist concept of the “safe space” to justify targeting other members for expulsion–i.e., I don’t like you, therefore any space you are in is not ‘safe’ for me, therefore you have to be expelled even if you have not actually violated the community’s ground rules. I objected to that on principle and I quit. A lot of other people quit with me.

But I was obviously fighting the waves there, because the ability to choose your own content and block anything or anyone you don’t like is a basic feature of every form of social media we now have. I think if this capability had never been developed, we wouldn’t have Facebook, or Instagram, or Tumblr. Fundamentally people object to socializing with people they don’t like or don’t agree with, and this is why so many attempts at community fail.

Anyway, my point was originally that in the early 90s, most online interaction was blind, and in fandom it was usually pseudonymous. In other words, you didn’t know what the people you were talking to looked like–there were no cameraphones, digital cameras were new, scanners rare, and uploading images was difficult and inconvenient–and you often didn’t know their real names, how old they were, where they lived or worked, or really anything about them apart from how they felt about whatever it was that you were a fan of. Even when MySpace became a thing, most people were doing that pseudonymously.

For many of us, this was part of the appeal of online interaction. You ‘met’ someone through what they wrote. It was a new way of getting to know someone and there was a kind of romance to it. Email communication was often slower and more in-depth then than it is now, with people approaching posting to a listserv more the way you would approach writing a letter or composing an essay. When I see those “reblog this if you think friends you met online are real friends” thing go around I just laugh. In the olden days, you could establish a fairly close friendship fairly quickly, just because written communication is so much more revealing than small talk. You just wouldn’t have any idea what that person was like in ‘real life.’ The experience of meeting an online friend for the first time in person was more powerful because you’d never *seen* them before.

Then Facebook became the thing. Facebook wants you to use your real name, your real face, and all your real information. That’s because it was originally conceived of as a kind of networking site for future professionals, and also because they want to be able to sell you things. Most social media platforms that evolved afterward replicated that feature, for the same reasons.

tumblr is attractive to me partly because it replicates some of those old-fashioned pre-Facebook modes of interaction. Most people on tumblr use pseudonymous handles. Most profile pictures are of something other than the user herself, and usually come from whatever thing the user is a fan of. The same user can set up multiple blogs under multiple pseudonyms. And you can post as much text as you want. It’s true that unless you lead with an image, a lot of people won’t read your text posts because they want to be able to know what fandom they’re about before they invest in reading the actual words, and that’s fair. It also incorporates some features that we all wished we’d had back in the day, including a means of keeping track of who’s reading your stuff. God, in the olden days, if you wanted to know whether people were visiting your website, you had to install a hit counter, and if you wanted them to be able to leave verbal feedback, you had to install a DreamBook or some shit like that. tumblr does a great job of helping you see where your audience is.

It is also, of course, much newer in its overwhelming preference for images (moving and static) and in the reblogging function (this was not a thing back in the day; the only way to circulate content was to attach it or incorporate it into an email). And when you first sign up it is really difficult to figure out how to have a conversation on it. The new udpate, of course, makes that even more difficult.

Anyway. So it makes perfect sense to me that there are a lot of people from my generation of internet users on tumblr. The reason it comes as a surprise is that tumblr is constantly *marketed* as a site for young people. You see this in everything from the staff’s tone of address (those automated messages you get telling you that someone is following you now, so “win!” or “sweet!,” or “go you!”–this is obviously a deliberate rejection of the boring grown-up formality you get from hoary old bastions like MicroSoft or Norton Antivirus) to the selection of advertisements. I’m kind of surprised that they published their user data, actually, because nobody WANTS people to associate their social media platform with old people. You want it to be hip and cool and cutting-edge and always feeling twenty-two. Youth is what sells. Middle age is extremely unappetizing, or at least that’s what nearly everyone who produces entertainment or advertising thinks.

Most of us who are old on tumblr aren’t here because tumblr recruited us. We’re here because this is where fandom went, and so we follow the fandom. And at first, I’ll tell you, I felt a little weird being in my 40s and on a website which felt like a club for teenagers. This is why I’m only following 31 people. The idea of “following” someone 30 years younger than me just seems creepy and I can’t get over that feeling. Most of the people I follow are either people I knew before tumblr, or people who I assume are more or less in my age range. It was, in fact, a huge relief to me to find the X-Files fandom, where there’s a sizeable contingent people in their 30s and 40s. I also see that there are a lot of people in their 20s and some in their teens, and that’s good too. I think it’s great that tumblr is intergenerational. Fandom always has been. And there will probably always be some friction between generations; but we’ll all get through it. We all have a lot to learn from each other.

Responses

[stoplookingup]:

I really liked LiveJournal myself. Much better for discussions, and I miss well-moderated forums (though god knows I don’t miss the badly moderated ones). It was like a much better version of the old Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL forums of the pre-internet days, which I remember incredibly fondly. Those were the days when everyone was just so excited to have so many other fans to talk to, it was like being at a convention EVERY SINGLE DAY. Ironically, I saw a post the other day that mocked people who miss journal sites with moderated forums. So, yeah. I’ll get back to my knitting now.

[mamajoan]:

A great post from Plaidder as always. I do think, at the risk of stating the obvious(?), that the age breakdown on tumblr probably varies by fandom. X-Files is an older show but with an enduring appeal, so it doesn’t surprise me that its fandom covers a wide age range. In other fandoms I’m kinda sorta following, the late teens and early 20s seem a lot more common.

I recently saw someone in that age range post about discovering her mom’s fanfic online. That gave me pause for sure. It won’t be too many more years before my kids will be old enough to go online and maybe start looking for fanfic and maybe find some of my old stuff. I’m not sure which of us will be more horrified by that experience. ;)

[herschelsmother]:

I still miss the AOL XF forums. It was my first exposure to the XF fandom – truly to the idea of “fandom” at all. It’s where friendships were born, many of which still last to this day. People took care writing their posts, and there were genuinely good discussions about the show. And about fanfic! That’s where my love for it really flourished. Really old-timers might remember the Primal Screamers – they were formed in the Fanfic Junkies folder in those forums. Technology has advanced so far beyond those days, but they still hold a certain appeal.

[plaidadder]:

nanmarie. If you are old, I am very very old (in that dreaded 55-death category), but I appreciate your perspective and your post. Hate to shock the young-uns about our existence, but the good news is you dont have to outgrow being a fangirl.

[dr-rushs-glasses]:

The anonymity is why I like this place. It keeps my “real world” life and my “internet” life separate. I mean, would I *want* my advisor to know I’ve written porn with college professors in it? Hell to the no. So it stays here.

My tumblr doesn’t come up when you search for my real name. No images of me come up when you search for my tumblr.

[mightyviper]:

I’ve never felt weird being on tumblr. No more or less so than I would on Twitter. There is still a huge percentage of older people on here and if you’re going to feel weird about potentially interacting with younger people the whole internet is a problem.

[fragmentedsandwiches]:

This is so good, and so true! I’m 33 but my dad is a computer guy, so we had computers in the house my whole life. I started using the internet sometime around 1997 when I was 15. It was weird back then- so slow it took like 20 minutes to download a 1024x768 jpeg. But I discovered chat rooms before fandom stuff. There used to be this HTML chatroom called “Hallucinet” that I discovered because the website hosted No Doubt’s website before they got their own domain. lol. So I went in that chatroom every day, I met a lot of awesome people there. we’d even role play sometimes; we had a pool of green jello among other random stuff. lol it’s so funny now that I think of it. I used to chat on some java chatrooms, too, but my favorites were HTML chatrooms even though it would refresh itself on a regular basis and sometimes all your text that you’d been typing would disappear. haha. Also, it would crash if there were more than 9 or 10 people on at once. haha. But anyway, while I knew everyone’s “a/s/l” (age/sex/location) and even first names, it was still very anonymous. And I still made a lot of really good online friends who I couldn’t wait to talk to every day. Then I made a few of my own websites on Geocities, which doesn’t exist anymore, and I coded them myself (I still code websites that way- I hate website editors). When I got into fandom I was on Yahoo Groups. I had my own groups and was a member of others. Eventually I got onto Livejournal in the early 2000′s, and that’s where I did most of my fangirling. It was also pretty anonymous but at the same time it wasn’t. Me and my friends (who I met on LJ) all posted both fandom stuff and personal stuff, too. I really used it like a journal and I connected with other people through personal situations as well as through fandom. Facebook changed everything, but I’m still old-fashioned and I try to keep everything separate from each other with different screennames (it’s almost impossible with Google, though, which I hate… I fought to keep my anonymous YouTube account and not tie it into Goole+. I had to do all kinds of crazy shit in order not to get roped in.) And yes, that’s one great thing about Tumblr- I never thought of it before, but yes- you can be either really public here, or really private. No one in real life knows about my Tumblr and I’d like to keep it that way. My Twitter account is the same way, though, too. No one irl knows about it.

So yeah, there’ a fun history of an “old person’s” experience with the evolving “social media”.

[girlnamedtsu]:

“BUT…BUT HOW WILL I GET EVERYONE TO AGREE WITH ME WHEN I COMPLAIN ABOUT THOSE GROSS PAST-21 PEOPLE AND HOW THEY HAVE THE GALL TO EXIST AND ENJOY THINGS?!?!”

[ cesperanza ]:

Great trip down memory lane and why older people are on Tumblr. I still don’t understand fully why fandom came here, but then I was very happy on Dreamwidth and don’t care much about visuals, but fandom is here, and so am I (mostly back to lurking like back in the nineties).

[calime33]:

Yeah. Follow the fandom, though it sometimes does lead to mighty odd places. But I guess that’s a part of the charm.

[justalurkr]:

I’m close enough to 54 it makes no nevermind and all of this makes sense. The only think I mislike about tumblr is the ephemeral nature, though that’s not really all that different from the old listserv system, either. justalurkr.tumblr.com, ^{Archived version} </ref>

[ladystarr16]:

I think we got pissed at LJ and started looking for alternatives, tumblr being one of them. Before fandom settled on Dreamwidth for a while, before AO3 was developed. We used to move in mass from one location to another back then.

[worriedaboutmyfern]:

I’ve been following the conversation with some interest, as a 39-year-old who first came to fandom through The X-Files. On the one hand, I will happily go to the mat for the right of middle aged women to be fannish and do fan things. On the other hand, I’m now in a fandom for a show targeted to youth (Star Wars: Rebels) and I am keenly interested in not doing to SWR what the bronies did to MLP, which is basically to make the fandom actively hostile to younger fans. I think I may be following a couple of younger people’s blogs. If anyone ever, for any reason, would prefer that I not follow them, please just let me know and I will promptly unfollow with no hard feelings whatsoever. I’m similarly happy to taganything for any reason, just ask me and I’ll do my best. I love all the reminiscences that have been crossing my dash lately about The Elder Days of Fandom. I remember those too! I was “The Fire and the Rose” on alt.tv.x-files and I think I wrote one quite terrible bit of fanfic where Mulder and Scully get trapped in some kind of telepathic dreamscape thingy. All I really remember is that I felt quite strongly that Scully would glow. No reason, just. She had to glow.

Anyway, I guess I think fans of different ages & interests should be able to co-exist with some basic respect on both sides. We have much better tagging/filtering tools now than we used to, and that should go a long way towards solving some of these problems.

[lovekellerstumbles]:

I had no clue what Tumblr was prior to finding hockey fandom - it’s been a hell of a ride and oh so pretty. I feel that so many of the people I follow are *young* (either in age or in life experience, not sure which sometimes), but it’s a different kind of interaction and I’m glad for it.

[storieshaped]:

I am in my 40s as well and I can say that I also like tumblr because it has a bit of an LJ feel to it and that’s where I first had my “fandom” home.

[mercurialkitty]:

Yes! I learned HTML and started making websites in 1996, but even as late as 1998, I was coding at a TERMINAL and then going to another computer to view what I’d done in a Netscape browser! For all its problems, Tumblr is a good mix mix of ease, speed, feedback, and privacy. I may have been going to Cons since 1986, but I really didn’t live fandom online until recently.

[porticos]:

Man, I had forgotten so much of this! I was still clinging to yahoo-groups for my fandoms and trying to hunt down fic on LiveJournal since the fandom fic archives weren’t updating much anymore. I think I stumbled onto tumblr because I was pulled in by the graphics, the gifs, the fan art. I have forgotten how rare and hard those used to be to find and to access! Thanks for this!

[pbrim]:

I have followed fandom from mimeoed fanzines sent via snail mail, to BBS to email lists to Usenet to LiveJournal and now to Tumblr, and to where ever it goes next. I never really used Facebook because you had to give out too much real info, and I didn’t want either my father or my stalker to know where I was or what I was doing on line. I do feel uncomfortable sometimes finding the person who wrote that really hot kinky porn I enjoyed is young enough to be my grandchild, but that’s what’s so good about being on-line – you get judged by your words and ideas, not your appearance or your age.

[churchofpoetry]:

To me, of course, 46 is young! Maybe I need to change back to one of my gray-haired icons. I’ve never bothered feeling intimidated or out of place here, and younger people have been very accepting.

[sushibrains4]:

I too was leery of Tumblr at first, but having since made the acquaintance of so many people in my age range (35-54 years old), I feel more at ease. This blog/essay/article definitely needs wider circulation.

[arts-junkie]:

I’m so glad someone took the time to articulate this feeling. Granted, I’m 25, but I still remember setting up a GeoCities website with a hit counter, participating in drawn-out e-mail chains and message board conversation, and operating every online presence through pseudonymity. Great essay!

[missbhavens]:

Next person who calls me old gets my foot in their larynx.

[smartgrrrl]:

This is wonderfully written, and perfectly articulates something about Tumblr’s appeal that I’d never considered before. This 44-year-old former Usenet denizen thanks you.

[bluepeets]:

Yep, this is good. I’m totally with this person on the pseduoanonymity factor. When I created a tumblr account I decided not to post my photo or name because I’d been cyberstalked (for real) several years ago, and while that was mainly water under the bridge, I wasn’t going to throw 2 dozen more clues out there in case they felt like reviving their activities. In general it’s served me well for other reasons. I meet who I want to meet, for the most part, and I don’t feel an obligation to say that much about myself here publicly.

Most of my tumblr friends are 10-15 years younger than me. Sometimes I say it keeps me young. Sometimes I say it makes me feel old. But I think it balances itself out, most of the time. ;)

[telanu]:

And even–maybe especially–if you are in that 13-18 demographic, I recommend reading this essay! Not because we’re all hitching our pants up to our armpits and blustering, “In my day we had to walk uphill both ways for the Internet,” but because the evolution of online culture from something mostly for the privileged and educated into something far more widely available is really interesting.

You’re in a unique position of having online culture actively marketed to you, tbh, and it’s not gonna last–even though you, presumably, will still be online long after you’re 18. Look into the crystal ball and see the future…

[start-anywhere]:

learned a lot about internetting from op. wish tumblr would too.

[storyplease]:

Heh, and here I am, feeling old because I got onto the internet around the time that DSL became ubiquitous. The funny thing is that most of the email friends/penpals that I had are people I’m still friends with today, and a number of people I met online are IRL friends now.

And, just like in the “old days,” even real friends come and go, just like net friends. But I find it easier to become friends with people who have similarities with me and as a parent, that’s harder to find in meatspace. So yeah. Internet is literally one of the only meaningful ways I connect with other people and for that, I’m eternally grateful, even if I may never be able to give them a hug or hang out IRL.

[zoniduck]:

This is pretty much my experience too, though my first foray into fandom was via LJ. I’m still bitter that DreamWidth didn’t take off. I find that tumblr is great for keeping up with fandom, but terrible for sustaining friendships.

[sadiejay88]:

Oh, I so get what you are saying! I had no computer education– I had to teach myself. My first experience with communities was bulletin boards and sluggish searches. My kids, on the other hand, have grown up with social media. I see the magic in fandoms and blogs, my kids roll their eyes at me. I felt like “the old person” on Tumblr for quite awhile, but it’s been a blast! Good to know I’m not the only one on here over 40!

[wanttoseeyoureyes]:

I love the idea that there are 40+ year olds on Tumblr. It affirms that even though we grow up and take on all of the duties and responsibilities of being adults it’s still okay to have fun. We can still participate in fandoms and hobbies and things that we love.

I personally plan on being a fangirl forever, so…

[brainonnightvale]:

I am also old and on Tumblr. And I also loved the X-Files! But I’ll try not to lecture anyone about it.

[zubenpics]:

Reblogging to add that one of the cool things about fandom in this era was the intergenerationality of it. In my late 20s and early 30s, I was frequently astounded at the intelligence and maturity that people ten to fifteen years younger than me were displaying (because declensionist narratives told me kids these days aren’t as smart as they used to be). The only other way I encountered people of that age group was through assigning them grades and griping when they didn’t do the reading for class. To be reminded that these are individuals with their own interests and smart things to say has been a really valuable part of fandom for me. And it bothers me that we worry about being “too old” or “too young” to have conversations with each other, because we’re missing out on a lot when we do that.

[parryhotterman]:

Pllllllbbbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtbtttttt, that fellow old coot skipped right over blogging (LiveJournal, Blogspot, Dream…something or another, it’s not the same “Dream”-whatever that exists today…) and the Rise of the Most Opinionated. (Suddenly “journal entries” weren’t meant to be things you wrote in pretty, flowered-covered paper journals that you hid from your parents…that’s a big step in our social history right there.)