portraitoftheoddity:

Sometimes I wonder if a lot of this tumblr wank – from callout culture to people policing villain fans – based on the idea that people can’t change, is baked right into the architecture of tumblr itself in some capacity. 

We can’t edit posts in a meaningful way. A post is just a snapshot moment in time, unmoored from the timeline by a lack of timestamp, which can take off with reblog upon reblog, with added commentary utterly decontextualizing it. But any edits or clarifications added by the OP are left behind, unless you dig through the post notes (which most people will not). Followups are lost. 

And because of that, we don’t have any concept of time passed or the potential for growth. 

All we witness is an idea by an individual in a single moment, separated from the context of any conversation or event that idea may have been responding to, or the person’s background and character, or changes in their thoughts over time and their capacity for growth. And this all feeds right into this fucked up notion tumblr has that human beings are somehow static; that a bad take from 2008 means someone HAS to be a monster in 2018. That redemption or atonement or the ability to evolve as a person is somehow a scam. 

And that’s so fucked up. People are not static. We are not screenshots and receipts. We are not a paragraph floating around on the internet, bounced from reblog to reblog like a piece of driftwood buffeted by a storm, dredged up periodically from the depths to circulate again. We change. 

We grow. 

I just wish this platform were better able to showcase that fact and remind us of it. I’d like to think we’d all be a little kinder to one another if it did.