The proliferation of image blogs powered by the tumblr platform raises the interesting question of how the internet as a structured society of individuals can collectively produce a homeopathic response to itself. The relationship between the particular nature of the way information is disseminated online and our diminishing attention spans  has become frequently remarked upon by behaviourists and educationalists: regular web ‘users’ suffer an inability to concentrate on large quantities of related information, preferring to reach a holistic understanding by absorbing multiple units of information from different sources. In this way the synaptic patterns of brain activity come to mirror the mechanical nature of the internet itself, whereby information on a webpage is often embedded from a source elsewhere, the page made complete by combining these packets from each distinct location.

While this patterning can be seen as a useful cognitive adaptation to the modern condition of information bombardment, whether it renders any forensic capability to discern truth from different pieces of contradictory evidence is questionable. Behaviourists argue that this is because on the internet it is almost always easier to click a sequential link and absorb a new piece of information than to stop and make coherent what information you already posess. In dialectic terms, it makes easy the complex task of bearing in mind the thesis and antithesis, but stops short of synthesizing, preferring instead the construction of ever more baroque towers of theses, and recalling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”. The problem in their eyes is that this is more of a dysfunction, an endlessly procrastinating loop, which, while it could never be accused of laziness exactly, promotes an enervating series of deferrals through indecision.

The notion of inspiration is a curious one. To surf through a variety of insp image blogs powered by tumblr is to encounter a disparate collage of art installation shots, photo journalism, fashion lookbook extracts and soft, or in contemporary terms, mildly nsfw, porn. Both insular and extroverted, the easy ability to repost from the blog of another produces a curious shared scrapbook of communicative personal experience, culminating in the demi-meme of acknowledged appropriation:  ’sup χ. In effect it creates the pleasing sense of a community engaged in inspiring itself out of a self-induced torpor. If ranting weblogs perform a teenage self-centred melodrama, the misunderstood voice alone with its diary and pen, then tumblelogs represent the early stirrings of late adolescent creativity, the melodrama formalised, put to music, friends found, band started, bingo. Thus there is always the sense of the achievable in insp blogs, the ever seductive notion that with enough hard work anything contained within it is attainable.  

The general absence of writing privileges the gesture, and indeed it could be seen as symptomatic of the medium that form should resolutely precede content. Therefore while the politics of insp is pretty, shall we say, unimaginative – many would perhaps be more accurately described as aspiration – the sense of excited potential is broadly pretty heartening. Curiously, the most interesting in these terms (and apparently most reposted) are the pornography tumblelogs, which in many cases favour an entirely secular approach to sex, in which there seems to be no curatorial agenda beyond the aesthetic, and which consequentially exhibit an unhesitant series of naked men and women, displayed solo or in flagrante, in all possible combinations. Given that the general timbre of sexual discourse on the internet has, in even the best cases, all the sophistication of a mainstream tv sitcom, and often far worse, the proliferation of these non-denominational sex blogs is the most interesting political development I can recall seeing online for some time.

The fascination the internet holds over us shows no sign of abating. The more we think about it, interact with it, the more entranced we become. The rise of inspiration image blogs is one response to this, a response that looks to promote a greater interrelation between forms of visual communication online and irl. While theories of postmodernity would seem to provide the simplest means by which to gloss this accrual of multiple nuggets of contradictory information minus the super-imposition of narrative, phenomena like insp blogs provide a mid-point in the internet’s growing political self-awareness. One day perhaps it will reach a point where it starts to prod hard at the disparity between its communitarian nature and the attempts make it conform to the rest of the society, to marketise, regulate and supervise it. Until then, until it works out exactly how it wants to proceed, a page of images displayed in glorious defience of any notion of intellectual property, to be cut, shared, pasted, spread about with subversive glee seems an inspiring way to waste some time. Not safe for work indeed.