Tumblr - a Social Media Used for Expressing Feelings

For so many years now, social media has been playing a big role in our society's everyday lives. People go on Facebook to chat with friends, to get updates to daily events, and sometimes to stalk their crushes. We go on YouTube to listen to music and watch videos. Some people tweet and follow their favorite actors, singers, and other famous people on Twitter. These are just a few of the social networking sites on the internet that people are very drawn into. People spend hours in front of the computer to surf the net. We can't deny that social media is affecting most, if not all, of us. The way it is changing people can either be positive or negative. One positive effect it has on most people, especially teenagers, is that it helps them express themselves when they find it difficult to open up to people and tell them how they really feel. The social media that really helps a lot of people in this kind of situation is the blog site called Tumblr.

Tumblr is a micro blogging platform where people can post texts, pictures, music, videos, quotes, and everything else that they want to share others. They can also reblog posts- like retweet in Twitter- that are created by other bloggers. It was created in 2007 by its founder and CEO, David Karp, and it has become increasingly popular within five years. People go on Tumblr for a lot of reasons. There are different kinds of blogs that people have like music blogs, fan-based blogs, photography blogs, funny blogs, and many more. But what most people have on Tumblr is a personal blog, in which they say or confess almost everything that defines who they are, including things about them that most people don't know of. That's one of the good effects Tumblr has on its users.

One way that Tumblr helps people express their feelings is by posting and reblogging pictures and quotes that describe their current mood. For example, if a girl is heartbroken because she just broke up with her boyfriend, she would most likely post sad pictures and quotes about how love doesn't exist. If a person is feeling hungry, he or she would go to food blogs to reblog every food that they're craving for. They also post song lyrics that relate to what their lives are like at the moment. A lot of people use pictures, quotes, and lyrics most of the time because they help express their feelings for them and they don't have to think about what to say. It's already in images and words and all they have to do is click the reblog button.

Most people feel some kind of freedom when they're blogging. It's their own personal blog and they write what they feel knowing that no one is going to judge or criticize them. There is a popular phrase that a lot of Tumblr users, even bloggers from other blog sites, say. It's "I blog to express, not to impress." And that's what they do. They don't care if they impress their followers or not. They just write things they want to say and things they want to share. Some write what they never could have said out loud in front of other people. Others write because they want to remember things that happened to them and the emotions that they felt during that particular time. Personal bloggers don't often think about their audience. They