Tumblr, endlessly frustrating...

[ratcreature]

So very often I want to find out the context of what led to an amusing image, and on Tumblr there is no way to ask, and often no proper source, just the image being posted, and then when you google image search the picture you only get a bunch of tumblrs as results.

Like just now, on my dashboard comes this post in which someone posted a vintage or pseudo-vintage safe sex poster, which people seem to find amusing for its gay subtext or something, that was of course created by manipulating the original J.C. Leyendecker advertising artwork (which of course wasn't for safe sex) which has a woman between the two soldiers, flirting with them, and by removing that woman they seem to flirt with each other. (Though some think the guys look more at each other in the original too, and it's often speculated that Leyendecker may have been homosexual etc. etc. but it remains that the original is not *that* obviously gay.)

However looking at the pic on Tumblr I have no idea whether someone actually created a (physical) poster at some point, or just manipped it to look like a poster or anything. On second thought, since the watermark URL leads to a photomanip contest site, a real poster seems unlikely. So I guess at some point this image was on that contest site, but I still have no idea who the creator was, because google image search gives no results from the contest site in the watermark.

And I'm actually not sure whether everybody who finds this amusing on Tumblr even realizes the underlying vintage artwork has been manipulated from its original state. It's incredibly frustrating, and you can't even comment there to ask or have a conversation.

ETA: But a search for "safe sex" on the contest site gave the manip in question, so after a bit over half an hour of websearching I now know that the credit for that manip goes to someone called Snowcrash and won the third place in a "vintage ad" contest on that site. Obviously this lack of proper sourcing on Tumblr does not help its timesink aspect at all.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

fascinating!

you know, with my journalism background i think the lack of sourcing/attribution on tumblr would drive me crazy.

[ratcreature]

It drives artists crazy too. The creator of the manip probably would have liked a source link to their art on that Tumblr post with 30000+ reblogs/likes when they only have 22 comments on that contest site. And the artist credited the Leyendecker ad properly, so then viewers would have known that too. But unfortunately no matter how often you see rants on Tumblr about the lack of attribution, many people seem to think that "found on the internet" means it wafts in an undefined space and just looking at a fun picture is enough. That is of course not a Tumblr-specific problem, lots of "funny picture" aggregation sites and blogs are exactly the same.

[zing_och]

*nods* Tumblr is really, really frustrating this way. I tend to treat it like TV and don't actually interact, but even then, the "but what is this? Who made it? Where's it from?" drives me crazy.

[ratcreature]

Yes. This exactly. I just can't treat pictures as if they fell out of the sky.

[sholio]

Ha, yeah - Tumblr drives me BONKERS for that, especially with a lot of "factual" stuff or pictures of places that I really would like to know more about, or get a source so I know if it's accurate or not.

And yet, I know how easy it is to just see something cool or interesting on my dash and click the "reblog" button without really thinking about it.

In a way Tumblr feels to me like going back to the mid-to-late 90s era when everyone was forwarding things by email. Jokes, cool pictures, scams, warnings about scams, usually all completely unsourced ... I know people still forward things around, but not nearly as much, and Tumblr feels like an updated version of basically the same thing.

[ratcreature]

I don't think I got many pictures in the mid-1990s. My dial-up cost by minute and my email storage was really limited. A for the warnings about scams and all the stuff that ends up on snopes, having that unsourced feels different from me, because it's basically the current incarnation of oral legends, moral parables and folk tales, only instead of forests and weird animals they feature things like "the aunt of the friend of my cousin was killed by her faulty microwave", and that kind of oral, communal culture has never been sourced, because it passes on in variations via story telling. Doing the same with a specific work that has a definite creator isn't the same, even if far down the line it feels similar.

I mean, not that this hasn't happened in the past too, like when the Grimms collected "folk tales" but because they ended up interviewing a bunch of hugenots who came from France not that long ago, fairy tales that had been written by Perrault or heavily edited by him, ended up in their collection as German folk tale.

[princessofgeeks]

*nods*

and what's really truly annoying is that the site design itself encourages reblogging without attribution and without acknowledgement, as if simply boosting the signal by reblogging were enough.

*frowny face*

they could have done it differently from the design aspect. BUT NO!

[ratcreature]

The problem is with the first posting on Tumblr. Tumblr does offer a source field, but if the first poster doesn't fill in that URL link, the subsequent reblogs only give the Tumblr post as source.

[mirabile-dictu.livejournal.com]

I'm in awe that you actually found the source. I don't know how often I've tried to trace back a photo but I don't think I've ever succeeded. Of course, if I don't find if in five minutes, I give up, so no doubt that's why.

Obviously this lack of proper sourcing on Tumblr does not help its timesink aspect at all.

Ha! So very true!

[ratcreature]

The watermark that at least gave the contest on the picture site helped. I often fail as well, or don't bother, but sometimes it really bugs me. Like I recognized that the faux-poster used Leyendecker art, and was fairly sure the original would not look this way, and then I wanted to see how it did look. So I took this detour by first going through Leyendecker art, before looking at that contest site.