My Tumblr dashboard today, showing just my posts and reblogs.

You know about Tumblr, right? It’s blogging machinery with social-networking contraptions built in and a wonderful, simple user interface. Posting text, photos, music, quotes, chat transcripts, and all manner of blog-style content in there is as easy as clicking an icon and filling out a form, except it’s also more fun than that. As a mere instrument for bloggery, it’s a delightful contraption — a free engine for communication.

But it’s more than that. Tumblr’s community features make it into something potentially else, something partway between a modernized LiveJournal and a less erratic Facebook. And there’s the rub. Tumblr is many things at once.

To sort out what I think about Tumblr, I’m thinking out loud.

If you’re not familiar with Tumblr, it’s easy to look at it and come away shrugging. “Okay,” you might say, “so it’s a blogging engine. So what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that Tumblr is loaded with mechanisms to connect one tumblelog to another — tumblelog being the name for the short-form, often rapid-fire style of blogs that Tumblr specializes in. All Tumblr blogs are potentially linked together through Tumblr, so you can follow another Tumblr user’s blog sort of like the way you follow someone’s tweets.

Those people you follow? Their posts show up on your Tumblr dashboard as they happen, turning that place into a something between a multimedia twitter feed and a bulletin board with posts only from people you follow.

If you like someone’s post, you can click a little heart to let others know you dig or you can reblog it, which posts the post to your own blog, maybe with additional commentary from you. So the posts, now, are tumbling all around, bouncing from blog to blog and follower to follower, picking up little likes and comments along the way. Tumble, tumble, blog, blog.

Here’s where it all gets nuts.

Reblogs plus comments plus reblogs equals intercourse. (Not sexual, just intercourse.) So some days your dashboard really can feel like a bulletin board, with people reblogging each other, back and forth, adding new commentary, all throughout the day. This can be fine or it can be excessive, but for sure it whittles at the notion of the blog post as a publication and instead makes it feel transient, like a forum post. Which is also fine, but also changes the potential state of the post. A tumblelog is several things at once, for good or ill.

Tumblr posts are always subject to reblogging and commentary, but that commentary isn’t filed beneath the post like a blog comment is, it becomes part of the post, transforming the statement into part of something larger. Except maybe transform isn’t the right word. Maybe the statement is dragged, cussing and spitting, into an argument or pushed out into the incoming traffic of withering jokes. The statement can be hoisted onto shoulders and paraded around the bar or it can be pantsed in front of the whole class.

When you post on Tumblr, you’re not (mock?) publishing like you are in WordPress or Blogger, you’re handing off your post to anyone else who wants to weigh in on it. You’re passing authorship along.

And now there’s a new wrinkle: Tumblarity.

What the hell is that? This is the hell it is: Tumblarity is a numerical ranking of your tumbleblog’s — what? — popularity, success, visibility, activity? Make a post, it goes up by three points. Get reblogged or liked? It goes up some more. The more followers you have, reblogging and liking your posts, the higher your Tumblarity climbs.

But, of course, Tumblarity fades. As time goes by, your points wear off, so you’ve got to keep posting, got to keep getting reblogged, got to keep getting liked, lest your Tumblarity should wane and leave you, like me, a Tumble-pauper.

Add a score onto any pastime and it potentially becomes a game. Keep score, and pretty soon there’s a way to lose. For me, whenever my Tumblarity drops below 10 or so, I feel like I’m losing. And that’s a very low Tumblarity, I think. Way low. The highest I’ve ever hit was the mid-thirties, when I picked up some followers and got some likes all in the same week. I don’t know why that happened when it happened, but now that I’ve tasted the sweet caramel of esteem, I feel bad when my Tumblarity drops.

Why? This is important: no reason. An arbitrary value has dipped and my Pavlovian dog fears that means no biscuit is coming. It is not reasonable. And yet.

What Tumblarity really does, in my case, is twofold:

1. It gets me to post things or reblog things just to keep my Tumblarity up.
2. It reminds me that very nearly no one is reading my tumblelog.

Tumblr, after all, isn’t just a blogging engine, it’s also a network, a closed but highly visible society. Anyone can read my tumblelog, but only Tumblr users can feed me esteem biscuits in one of Tumblr’s two flavors: like and reblog. And of my 17 or so followers, I think fewer than 8 are still Tumblr users. The rest are like empty cicada shells, staring.

On the one hand, I love Tumblr’s simple blogging tools. I very nearly migrated this blog to it, just to take advantage of its simplicity. On the other hand, Tumblr’s circuit society doesn’t know I’m there, and I don’t grok how to infiltrate it — or if it has a segment of its society that I’d really fit into. As a society, Tumblr has its subcultures — there are corners for photogs and porn fans, pop culture analysis and post-modern comedy — but I don’t feel like I’m a part of any of them. I feel like I’m eavesdropping on a signal, like I’m skimming chatter off a radio wave. Some nights, when Justine Bateman’s tumblr is alive with reblogs, I feel like I’m sitting in the attic with a headphone to my ear. When the student I followed back when she was doing research on The Hobbit posts pictures of book-filled rooms or breakfasts, I feel like I’m shushing my friends so I can overhear her life from the next table over.

That is, I follow these people, and they become more visible, but they don’t feel any closer. I feel sometimes the dizzying sensation of a dolly zoom in reverse, revealing the space between my desk and the rest of the world. People become very clear and very far away.

And now, as I write it, I realize: When I’m tumbling, I’m also spying on a life I wish I had. I’m peering across some wide snowy field at a me that is clearer and still far away — a me that is funny and crass and sexy, that is eating in cozy cafes, that is photographing far-away places, that is connected online to lots of clever strangers, that is read and liked. A me that, when cut down to a few select frames, is worth reblogging.