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A post jumps out at you: "Dumbledore is the ultimate granddad." Uh, hello. No he isn't. Why are people revering this authority figure just because the books paint him as a hero? Can't people think more deeply about what they read?
You think about the best way to set these people straight. One sentence won't do it— "Dumbledore is the ultimate granddad" certainly didn't impress you. To convince your audience, you'll need to get specific. You think back to the books and type out:
Dumbledore is literally the scum between my toes
- LEAVES A 1YO CHILD ON A DOORSTEP IN
THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT LIKE ‘OH NVM THEYLL FIND HIM IN THE MORNING LOL’
- knows good and well how the dursleys
are abusing and neglecting harry and just LETS THE SITUATION CONTINUE even
though we see in the fifth book that he has the power to stop it (the
‘remember my last letter’). he lets harry be LOCKED UP IN A CUPBOARD and
abused for ten years both because of the ””protection”’ privet dr has for
harry (don’t worry, it’s only at the cost of his emotional and mental
wellbeing, it’s all good) and because he WANTS harry to fall in love with
the wizarding world, like voldemort did, like snape did, because it will
make him easier to manipulate
- GROOMS HARRY TO BECOME A PERSON WHO
WILL WILLINGLY DIE FOR ””’THE GREATER GOOD””
- PURPOSEFULLY WITHOLDS INFORMATION FROM HARRY AND KEEPS HIM UNINFORMED SO HE’LL DO WHAT DUMBLEDORE WANTS WHEN DUMBLEDORE WANTS HIM TO DO IT
(Excerpt taken
from apriki.tumblr.com. The rest is also pretty hilarious.)
You're excited to see what people think. Will they reblog? Add to your list? Argue against you? You quickly BS some stuff about moral ambiguities in King Lear so you can get back to Tumblr, where the interesting stuff is happening.
Okay, you're not a high school student any more. You're you again. And hopefully you're starting to think about the paradox of a student reluctant to write a literary analysis for school who is excited to enter a discourse analyzing literature.
With that in mind...
Internet and the End of Argument
I want to take a step back from the somewhat esoteric world of Harry Potter fandoms on Tumblr and look at a scholarly article making a claim about what the Internet is doing to the conventions of academic argument.
Come on, leap with me. You know you want to.
Simon Barker’s “The End of Argument: Knowledge and the Internet” predicts that thanks to the Internet, fields of knowledge “may adopt greater informality and may cease to idealise rigorous argument.”
He starts by saying that valuing rigor in argument is an arbitrary convention that arose due to the medium through which most arguments are shared, which is writing. Think about the properties of writing: it's static and permanent; it’s private; it’s discrete (as sayeth Barker). All of these properties play into how you write an argument. You record a logical progression of ideas, eliminating anything that distracts from your argument, and present your readers with only what you want them to see. Your readers most likely cannot follow up with you, so you elucidate every detail, explicate every step, “put as much of our meaning as possible into words” (169).
Writing is not the only way to use words to communicate, though. There’s also talking. I know, I know.
But when we think about academic argument, we tend to assume these arguments are rigorous, which means they’ve been written down. However, as Barker discovered, talking can be a more effective way of conveying mathematical ideas than a formalized proof:
“Ordinary conversation between mathematicians can often convey a new solution in a matter of minutes, whereas a formal proof delivered in a seminar will take an hour, and a written article may take several hours or even days to understand.”
Barker argues that the Internet can help mathematicians (and other academics) return to this more informal, conversational way of exchanging ideas. His article outlines what the Internet allows writers to do, which includes
- immediately publish something
- make changes after you’ve shared your writing
- read and respond to comments from people all over the world
- post videos of yourself talking about a subject
All of these actions mirror having a conversation through speech. You have your ideas, but you’re not sticking to one formalized thought process. You’re collaborating with other people, which means you might start out talking about one thing and end up talking about something completely different, because you’re drawing from a whole network of thoughts.
Basically, Barker would say academic discourse currently starts with someone doing this
and ends with someone doing this.
With the Internet, it can look more like two people doing this:
Applying Barker to Tumblr
Let’s look back at the Tumblr post about Dumbledore (the “scum between my toes” one). It’s obviously not an academic argument, but it is a persuasive text. It’s tricky to measure how effective Tumblr posts are in convincing people of their arguments, but I do want to point out that this post has an impressive 45,202 notes (including shares, likes, and comments). This means many people who don’t personally know the writer saw and interacted with the post (including me, and now you).
What about this post would cause thousands and thousands of people to like it and share it?
...Can we answer this question using Simon Barker’s ideas about argument in the Internet?
Barker argued that rigorous argument is closely related to writing, but the Internet is allowing us to communicate in a way that is closer to speech. While he was more specifically talking about the immediacy of communication, the Tumblr post demonstrates many ways in which the text is emulating speech. For example, the ALL CAPS AT THE PLACES WHERE IF THE WRITER WAS SPEAKING TO YOU SHE’D BE REALLY LOUD.
The post is also set up as a list of bullet points, one example after another, as if she’s listing them as they come to mind. (As opposed to revising her points after writing them down, as someone would do before being published in print. As I did for this assignment.)
The writer also utilizes colloquial expressions, such as “it’s all good”, “literally told”, “like what the FUCK?”—phrases commonly spoken, particularly by young people. She concludes with “and this is NEVER ADDRESSED in the books” which feels like the end of a rant—she's trying to wrap everything up by saying “and” then jumping into her biggest point. You can feel the writer's energy coming off the page.
Perhaps the post is popular because it’s just fun to picture someone going off on an intensely angry rant about a book character.
Another Dumbledore Post
I want to suggest that the “about a book character” piece is more important than the “intensely angry rant” piece. This post is not a stand alone attack on Dumbledore. There are many other posts about Dumbledore on Tumblr. For comparison’s sake, let’s look look at an excerpt from the post “Thoughts on Dumbledore” which begins
“Dumbledore judges the people he works with based first and foremost on how loyal they are to him. Not because he thinks he’s all that, but because, as I said, he views people as game pieces, and you can’t have your game pieces acting up, can you?”
This post is setting forth a similar argument: Dumbledore is much darker than the text gives him credit for. Like the “scum between my toes” one, this uses informal and colloquial language, but it much more closely follows the conventions of American Standard English. It uses conventional punctuation and capitalization.
This post has 8,842 notes on Tumblr—not as many as the scum one, but still enough that people who aren’t friends with the writer were reading and sharing it. It was taken from a longer piece at Harry Potter Essays, where it received 115 comments over the span of 3 years. Clearly, people have been reading, sharing, and responding to this essay.
Tumblr as an Educational Network
Hmmm. People have been reading, sharing, and responding to a particular text. They’ve been building arguments around literary analysis. Sounds like lit crit. Maybe “#HE IS THE KING OF THE DOUCHEBAG DAD CLUB” is actually a valuable contribution to an educational discourse.
I know it might sound counterintuitive, but Tumblr is (to use the technical term) a learning network. There are many books out there that legitimize the use of collaborative learning, especially through the Internet. This one even has a chapter called “Education is communication.” The idea of education as a communicative group effort is pretty much a given.
According to one pedagogic book, a learning network is created through “establishing and maintaining trust, and building shared understandings of products and processes, at a distance” (4). Tumblr uses informal, even jokey language (“douchebags dad club”) as a way of building trust with peers. The site also builds shared understandings of products and processes through hashtags, a specialized vocabulary (for example, "OTP" and "shipping"), and an abundance of posts that values and tries to understand certain texts (such as the Harry Potter book series).
I don’t want to suggest that the #harry potter tag on Tumblr can or should replace AP Literature, but I want to insist that there are similarities between scholarly literary discourse on say, Shakespeare, and Harry Potter Internet forums. One is professional and consequently its formal conventions are more rigorously enforced; the other, being recreational, is oftentimes overrun with memes. But both are communities of people who find merit and interest in a particular text and want to deeply engage with it. Both want to see how the stories we tell and value help us understand the world we live in.
Tumblr, however, happens to be getting closer to what Barker sees as the potential of the Internet: getting us back to the day of having our minds being opened through casual chats with other scholars.
Getting back to hypothetical high school you: how do you feel about the Dumbledore post now? I hope you’re on board with this as a valid (albeit recreational) way of learning. The conventions of Tumblr are different than the conventions of academic literary and cultural criticism, but the communities have similar functions. The main difference? Academia wants to critically analyze texts while being rigorous; social online spaces want to critically analyze texts while they
And who knows? If Barker's prediction is correct, academia might be going in the direction of the dancing Dumbledore.
Where I got the gifs:
30 Rock "This is boring" - Lizbeanism Philosophy
Emma Stone is not impressed - Wifflegif, mylifethroughemmastone.tumblr.com
Leaping dancer man - iwontdance.com
Condescending Sherlock - Pics Fair
Condescending Sherlock - Pics Fair
Fast typing Jim Carrey - Gifsec
Pretty girl reading books - Rebloggy
Hamilton high five - theodysseyonline
Devilishly excited young girl - media.tumblr
Loud and confused Steve Carrell - Lupine Life
"I'm mad as hell!" guy - GifsGallery
Shia LeBeauf calming you down - media.tumblr
Shock and awe over tea- reactiongifs
Party hard - Tasteuni
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