Migration, non-use, and the ‘Tumblrpocalypse’: Towards a unified theory of digital exodus

Abstract

In this article, we use what we provisionally term the ‘2018 Tumblr migration’ to explore how (1) platform ‘non-use’ and (2) platform ‘migration’ are overlapping aspects of a broader phenomenon of digital ‘leaving’ or exodus. A unified analysis of this phenomenon has important consequences for understanding emergent relationships between individual agency, platform structure, and online culture. The sociotechnical practices of leaving resulting from the 2018 Tumblr adult content ban link up to fundamental questions around movement, selfhood, and power. We discuss non-use as an overlapping and interacting set of social decisions largely (and perhaps unsurprisingly) disincentivized by the technical affordances of the platform, as well as migration as a shifting and reconfiguring of platform specific social relations. Placing classic questions of social theory in conversation with scholarship on platform socialities, we explore the 2018 Tumblr purge/migration to elucidate the polyvalent technical and social actions involved in ‘leaving’.