u kno when u keysmash but the jumble of letters dont convery the right Feeling so u gotta backspace and re-keysmash to turn ur HKELSXPXA to a JKFSDKAS
Vaguely wondering how future anthropologists will explain this…
*raises hand* Hi. So - the use of a keysmash is emotive. You use it to indicate that you’re so overwhelmed with emotion that you can’t even type, you’re just flailing at the keyboard.
So why is there a difference between a “hkelsxpxa” and a “jkfsdkas” or an “asdfs”?
Because language evolves! It’s actually really exciting to think about, but there’s a reason why slang is continually changing and why Old People are usually characterized by not knowing the slang variants that are being used by The Youth - it’s because the way we use words changes over time, especially in response to technological or environmental changes.
And text-based communication - texting someone on your phone, or chatting with friends on Skype or Discord - is actually really new, this is something which started in my lifetime. And grammatical rules have been evolving and settling into place around that form of communication.
For instance, linguistic researchers have noticed that anyone who’s grown up with texting being a normal thing will usually not end their texts or IMs with a period unless they’re angry or annoyed. This is because it’s a lot harder to do a run-on sentence in those mediums; you can just hit ‘enter’ and go to a new line. A period, then, becomes an indicator of emphasis, instead of an indicator of “there is nothing missing from this sentence” - and it’s an indicator of negative emphasis (rather than the positive emphasis that an exclaimation mark can give).
So, the keysmash has its own grammatical rule. And it’s one that makes sense, considering that it’s entirely possible for a keysmash to be caused accidentally - by something falling onto the keyboard, or a cat walking across it. The rule, then, is that a deliberate keysmash and an accidental one need to be distinguishable.
So a deliberate keysmash will nearly always use keys only in the home row, and usually in a particular order that isn’t likely to have happened purely accidentally.
So, future anthropologists will likely explain it as a marker of language evolving to work with a text-based medium where expressions and body language are difficult-to-impossible to convey. Much like emojis, crytyping, and whether or not you put punctuation at the end of a sentence (and in what context you do so), keysmashing is used to convey how you feel - in a way that body language and facial expressions would usually be expected to fill in the gap.
I did a survey once of people who use keysmash and over half of people reported that they’d adjust a few letters or delete and re-smash when it didn’t look “right” (except for the poor Dvorak users, who had kind of given up on keysmash entirely because their vowely home row made theirs emotionally illegible to other people).
I actually think the real advantage tumblr has over other websites is the ability of “reblogging” to create posts with contributions from multiple users. This allows people to build on others’ posts, whether that’s derailing them with a terrible joke, drawing the scenario proposed as a comic, answering the question posed originally in lively essay format, or rewriting the previous interaction as a scene in Shakespearean iambic pentameter.
This is also why Tumblr is hard to make profitable. Individual users have relatively little power to create good content. It’s interactions between users that actually creates the good content, and therefore, no one involved in the good stuff on Tumblr can really claim to “own” it or be the “creator.”
Posts have to navigate through Tumblr to pick up the people that can add to them in a constructive way, and then when users interact, the whole interaction can spread across the website as a new evolution of the content. There’s no way to simplify this process.
Theres a whole ecosystem running here. It’s not as simple as Creators and Consumers, and you can’t simplify it to that. That’s not how ART works, let alone posts. There’s symbiosis. The users that do the nitrogen fixation aren’t the ones photosynthesizing. The detritivores can’t also be the predators. The “rappers doing normal shit blog” has a different niche than the person that asks why Lil Wayne has socks on in the jacuzzi, who has a different niche than the person who says “those are his hooves, you bitch!”
It’s like bioavailability, you see. The user that responds “Those are his hooves, you bitch” is like a predator on a high trophic level, unable to directly feed on producers, needing primary consumers to convert the post into a form that makes a punch line possible.
This is what I love about Tumblr. It feels more like discussing a common matter with the people you meet while out for a walk than trying to hold a conversation with twenty people at once in a crowded room
I have seen a lot of these “how Tumblr works”-posts going around lately, and I think this one says it really well. I’m not necessarily here for the original post but for the snowball effect of a reblog chain that hopefully follows
College dorms in the late 90s early 2000s had poster boards everywhere and everyone stuck random notes on, some that continued a conversation. Tumblr makes me think of college posterboards.
Tumblr is improv. We’re constantly yes-anding each other.
I knew a linguist once who did a study on conversations in bathroom graffiti and that’s something else tumblr conversations remind me of.
