When you reblog a post on tumblr, you create a new post.

It’s one of the weirder parts of how that hellsite is implemented. In programming terms, this is the difference between passing by reference and passing by value. On other sites, sharing a post is just a fancy way of linking to it. If the original gets deleted, it’s gone. Unless you saved a screenshot.

Tumblr reblogs are a lot more like screenshots. The text gets copied (typos and all) onto your blog. If the original gets deleted, you still have the copy.

This explains a weird feature of our notifications there. If I reblog something and someone interacts with that reblog, tumblr will inform me that they “liked your post”. But that’s not my post? It’s someone else’s post.

I digress. Today I actually want to talk about subtext and interpretation. Media literacy entails reading beyond the text and into the meaning created by what specifically a text presents and how. This includes the classic stuff like framing and implications and all the things one might have ideally learned from a course studying literature and language.

If you’re on tumblr, it’s probably for fandom, and I bet this isn’t the first time you’ve seen an essay about media literacy, particularly in this zeitgeist. But this post isn’t about fiction at all. Not really.

See, the most common media literacy test faced by the modern internet user is unrelated to English class and not more than tangentially related to whatever piece of pop culture they find themselves fixated on.

Enough swerve and preamble. What I really mean to discuss is the humble vaguepost.

“Vagueposting” is, fittingly, ill‍-​defined. Let’s nail it down by opposition, shall we? A clear, honest post should be a bit easier to characterize. It’s tempting to say “you know it when you see it.” This in fact is the key feature. You know what you are looking at; you know what it is saying.

You’re reading a vaguepost if you aren’t sure what it’s really saying. But “saying” is itself vague (sorry). Communication has at least three parts: what’s said, who it’s said to, and why it’s being said.

Some vagueposts just allude to things in that “if you know, you know” sort of way. Here, it’s unclear what they’re saying.

Some vagueposts are replies with extra steps: they address people without naming names, grouch about issues without pointing at what in particular set them off. Here, it’s unclear who or what they’re responding to.

Which, incidentally, makes this a effective form for generating engagement bait. If people can vaguepost without specifying what they’re really talking about, they can mislead and exaggerate or make things up entirely, if that makes for a better poast.

But why lie about it? This brings us to the last tendency of vagueposting, and what I consider its most insidious effect. It’s the very definition of bad faith.

If I grouch about a time some football fan was mean to me, when no such interaction ever occurred, the deception doesn’t just lie in the fabrication of facts. Rather: what would motivate me to make this up? Maybe I simply hate football and all its fans; I want people to understand that this is what they’re like. So even if this exact interaction never happened, it’s still the sort of thing that does happen. It’s spiritually true.

Now, if I just said “people don’t hate football fans enough,” then other haters would nod along. But realistically, I know that most won’t change their opinion just from me telling them to. But if I vividly explain how much they suck, isn’t that more persuasive?

So imagine how persuasive it might be if I don’t lead with being a football hater. I just tell a story of what it’s like to talk to one of them, and the only reasonable takeaway is that these creatures are insufferable.

If I do my job well, why should I even tell you to hate football fans? Why should I tell you I hate them? It goes without saying; it speaks for itself.

But you might have been more skeptical of the story if you knew it came from a frothing at the mouth hater, so I must do my best to look reasonable.

This dissembling is the nature of the third kind of vaguepost. Bad faith is disguising the true intention behind your posting. Really, this taxonomy describes rhetoric more generally, rather than vagueposting specifically. A vivid anecdote (which happens to be all lies) is simple propaganda; few would call it a vaguepost. Luckily, vagueposting was just another stepping stone to what I wish to discuss.

It’s at this point it would be most honest of me to disclose that you’re reading a vaguepost right now. Or at least, what begin life as one.

First, a mutual of mine on tumblr had vagueposted about a take she’d seen cross her dash a few times. I left a frustrated reply to her, and we began discussing the matter in direct messages.

In the process of composing my counterarguments, I had a major realization about the nature of social media communication: then I started writing a diatribe that metamorphosed into this post.

Something that quickly became clear is that the post my mutual was griping about had a several rhetorical weaknesses. I quickly backed off of arguing about it; I didn’t even end up sending the paragraphs I wrote in its defense (it didn’t deserve it).

Yet I still find the underlying realization interesting and want to share it. I say all of this because, if presented without caveat, it may look like I’m litigating some other argument by proxy. But this is a toy example created to illustrate a broad point; it doesn’t map accurately to the discussion that prompted it. (Which is why I will remain vague about what that discussion was.) Without further ado:

Let’s imagine that Alice is composing text to put on some online platform. Specifically, Alice is making an incisive argument against P, some position we won’t specify. She lists several salient faults with it, and concludes her tirade with a quip in favor of Q, an opposing position.

Beth sees this and groans at the bias dripping off that post. It’s clear that Alice doesn’t want you thinking about whether any of those critiques she so proudly listed also apply to Q. What a dishonest spin. Q gets an offhanded mention at the end, because if Alice had described it in any detail at all, then readers could come to their own conclusion, and that wouldn’t be convenient for the dunk.

Now, is Beth justified in coming to this conclusion?

The answer depends on just what was glossed over when we said “Beth sees this.”

Imagine we don’t know anything about the P vs Q debate, and Alice’s post is our first window into that world. It’s clearly a distorted view. We don’t know anything about Q, but her slant clearly implies that it’s much better than P.

But does this ever happen quite like that? Do people just go around, absolutely unprompted, cooking up biased treatises against their imagined debate opponents? There’s got to be at least a bit more context than that.

Still, many plausible contexts won’t amend Beth’s judgment by much. Perhaps Alice heard about some recent news or viral discourse will bring greater attention to P vs Q, so she’s preemptively agitating in favor of Q. Perhaps someone had outright asked her what’s the deal, and this is how she chose to introduce the debate.

But it may be more realistic to imagine that this was a vaguepost. Alice found out about someone (perhaps Beth, but let’s imagine an unseen Mallory) who genuinely believes in P, so Alice’s vaguing about it in lieu of arguing directly.

Again, not much should change in Beth’s evaluation of the post (if anything, this makes it more dishonest).

But suppose it’s not a vaguepost at all. Suppose that a dialogue was happening. Alice wrote that post in response to Mallory, but Beth happened to see Alice’s post first. (We didn’t say what kind of platform it was, after all. This type of misunderstanding happens often in chatrooms.)

Now things start to get complicated. If Mallory is a hardliner against Q, then perhaps earlier posts in the conversation have already laid out the case against it, and Alice doing so again would be redundant. Rather than it being dishonest not to describe Q in detail, it’s quite basic communication. Context matters, but we all know this.

Now suppose there’s no thread of communication between Alice and Mallory. Even if it’s just a garden variety vaguepost, who is it for?

If this is social media, with feeds and followers, then Alice is probably followed by plenty of other proponents for Q. Anyone opposed to it couldn’t stand to follow her. (Maybe she preemptively blocks them!)

So when Alice writes about how stupid P is and caps the post off with a compliment to Q, this isn’t an argument for Q. She’s talking to her friends who are already convinced of Q, casually commiserating. (Or perhaps there had been some confusion among them where P is concerned, and she’s hoping to dispel that.)

And this, subtly yet importantly, is just like the previous scenario. The details of Q have already been established, and the dynamic of communication yields no reason to redundantly sell Q to an audience that has already bought it.

Beth may be tempted to call Alice’s post misleading, but how is it leading if Beth isn’t following? Rather than being crafted to deceive her, it wasn’t even crafted conceiving of her. The post isn’t for you.

But then: how did she even see it? We had imagined that Alice had a number of followers, a gaggle of Alicelings who all believe in Q just like her. This is social media, so the Alicelings’ engagement propagates her post to the feeds of her followers‍-​of‍-​followers.

We had also supposed that no one opposed to Q could stand to follow Alice, but with every step removed, that repulsion weakens. Not all of her followers are as zealous.

Two or three degrees of separation, and you’d expect the post to have reached even those with only the vaguest of inclinations toward Q, who themselves easily followed by people outright partisan for P.

And at from this vantage, they witness a post so absorbed in its adherence to Q that it hadn’t even considered it might be read by people who actually believe in P.

So, recall our guiding question. Beth saw this post, and called it dishonest. Is she justified?

More than just “context matters”, this is context collapse. again, i’m not describing anything writers before me haven’t already observed and analyzed.

Alice says “I like pancakes,” and Beth says “So you hate waffles?” and we laugh at this, say no bitch that’s a whole new sentence.

But imagine Beth was holding a meeting for a club of waffle lovers only. And suppose this club exists because there are a few assholes who enjoy pancakes but like making fun of cringey waffler lovers most of all, and they bully others for their inferior choice of breakfast at the slightest opportunity.

So the waffle lovers banded together to reassure each other. Then Beth sees a girl walk up to her and cockily declare “I like pancakes” with a grin on her face. Does this context make the kneejerk conclusion any more compelling?

Beth gets upset because she sees exactly where this is going, and now Alice gets to look around utterly bemused, not understanding why three words of personal opinion has Beth about to jump down her throat. Man, waffle lovers sure are getting hysterical.

What “I like pancakes” really means is contextualized by who is saying, where they’re saying it, and who’s hearing it.

Maybe Alice really had nothing to do with the bullies. (Or maybe she wanted to see if the waffle nerds really were as ridiculously sensitive as everyone says.)

It happens that Beth’s assumption of imminent bullying was jumping at shadows, this time. But treating “a whole new sentence” as a valid counterargument enables this game of rhetorical I’m‍-​not‍-​touching you.

Like a rhetorical necker cube, swapping out the context can load very different meanings into the same words. Which context you interpret a post within is a function of what assumptions you’re primed to make about the poster.

The legends say that over a decade ago, tumblr had a “feature” where reblogging a post let you edit what the OP original said.

Here’s the thing I find interesting: this never stopped. On every social media platform, we’re constantly editing each others post and then blaming the poster for the editor’s decision.

Alice wrote an post against P that made complete sense in the context of her Q‍-​believing following. One of her Alicelings then reblogs it into an audience without that context. And as established, without context, it has a different effect. A post meant to create a more balanced understanding of the issue for the half‍-​informed transforms into a post that creates a less balanced understanding of the issue for the uninformed. A table tips over because one of the legs was removed.

Beth, seeing an Aliceling’s reblog of the post, experiences a dishonest message that presents a distorted account of the issue.

But who is being dishonest? All Alice did was talk to her friends. All the Aliceling did was click “reblog”. Is it an act of deception and sneaky rhetoric to talk to people already on the same page as you? Is it lying to click reblog?

Or, equivalently, we can agree it’s not good to be dishonest. People shouldn’t misinform others. So who should have acted differently in this scenario? Was it wrong for Alice to speak without considering how people not even in the conversation would interpret her words? Was it wrong for an Aliceling to reblog a post she agreed with?

But this question leads us astray. Or rather, it leads us into dangerously practical questions where “P vs Q” is a juvenile equivocation, treating as the interchangeable both semantic quibbles and important matters of disinformation and bigotry. Whether Alice did something wrong here depends on whether she was speaking carelessly about high stakes matters. But I don’t want to discuss ethics, really.

What I want to get at is best piqued by asking: who wrote the post?

If some hypothetical Mallory had written a post with the exact context that Beth assumed, then that Mallory would have been dishonest toward Beth. But this deceptive Mallory is a figment; it does not describe Alice nor the Aliceling.

I perceive a kind of distributed agency here. Two posters working together have given rise to an act of communication that cannot be attributed to either poster alone.

I said it at the start, after all.

When you reblog a post on tumblr, you create a new post.

You have authored a whole new message; it shares words and attribution with the original, but not the same context nor its meaning.

But who creates the context?

If Mallory the breakfast bully reblogs Alice’s photo (gushing about how yummy her pancake was this morning), then the reblog gains a new implication of making fun of waffle lovers. It’ll be seen by a bunch of other breakfast bullies who might say things like “i love how positive pancake lovers are. it’s like they aren’t ashamed of what they eat.”

You can already imagine unwitting blogs seeing this, appreciating the vibes of getting unabashedly excited about food, and share this not realizing what’s really being said. The recontextualization has rewritten the post.

But these examples make it seem too clean. It almost sounds like I’m lifting blame off the original poster and placing it onto anyone who reblogs it: the interpretation of posts becomes your fault for reblogging it. But who truly authors the context? It gets stitched and frayed with every share.

Vagueposts often come in swarms. Given a contentious enough inciter, one poster will get upset, write a snippy vaguepost, someone else will see it, and write an even snippier counter‍-​vaguepost, and if you’re in the eye of this sort of storm, you can witness a whole conversation unfolding in these back and forths, relationship invisible except for the damning juxtaposition.

A mutual reblogs one of these posts, and they have now picked a side in a unseen war they might not even be aware of.

That is context they have nothing to do with and didn’t put there. everyone else on your feed has assigned a meaning‍ ‍‍—‍ a whole new sentence, if you will‍ ‍‍—‍ to that post.

Again I point back to that guiding question. Is Beth right to call Alice’s post dishonest? “Dishonesty” is a word that assigns agency and intent and blame. Beth might find herself irritated by Alice’s post and peer into the specifics of its wording for some gotcha to anchor her dispute on. It’s in fact this sort of dissection that prompted my writing this post at all. I think this exercise misses the mark.

Conventional frameworks of rhetorical analysis fall apart if you truly appreciate the medium we’re dealing with here. Or rather, the type of medium, because you can see the same effect even more clearly in the case of livestreaming. It’s common for contentious figures to be clipped out of context saying something that suggests a damning message, but one that’s very different from the beliefs they actually hold. But they did say it. But the livestreamer does not author seven second video clips; they author hours long streams. The act of editing creates a new piece of media they had, euphemistically, a collaborative role in.

I worry that the conventional style of arguing against posts on platforms like tumblr involves an auteur theory of shitposting.

You see a stupid post on your dashboard, and you assume OP was being stupid. This is often a reasonable conclusion (We piss on the poor there.) But even when it’s true, it’s a gettier statement. true and justified, but not justified truly. what you saw was a stupid reblog, which the OP had, euphemistically, a collaborative role in the post you see. Attributing intent to them is therefore fallacious, though seldom wholly incorrect.

Hellsites can only exist if there are sinners to populate them. We are cogs in a vast machine, and when a cog scrapes against you, do you blame that cog, or the gear turning it, or the spring driving that one? Could you instead blame the devil who built the machine? Could you blame yourself for being there in the first place?

Yet I find this conclusion unsatisfying. There’s no shortage of spiked wheels going out of their way to cut people, so perhaps they don’t need more plausible deniability for their malice. This analysis is not meant to absolve them. Posters are responsible for the content of their posts, and how it sounds out of context must be accounted for.

I don’t have answers, so permit me one last swerve. There’s an attitude prevalent on tumblr that’s always quietly irritated me. So many posters take a self‍-​harming level of ownership over their posts, a choice (all the more tragic if they don’t realize they’re making a choice) to view every tag and reblog as their business, their responsibility, addressed to them personally. They hurl invective at rebloggers like a suburbanite shouting at kids to get off their lawn. They leave notifications and reblogs enabled and take great offense at receiving notifications and reblogs.

And I suppose it would be unfair to single out that archetype alone. We can feel superior to both sides if we take a moment to note the bizarre impulse to disagree at length only in the tags, propagating the post for all your followers to see, and in a format that vanishes just as soon as it propagates further. Or the lack of social grace it takes to derail a thread into something entirely unrelated, wasting the time of the OP and anyone scrolling through the reblogs.

Why would anyone behave so stupidly? It’s enough to make one sympathetic to that refrain so often said from the first group, addressed to the second: make your own damn post.

But I can’t decide if this should be spoken in the tone of explanation or excuse:

When you reblog a post on tumblr, you create a new post.