A Funny Thing About Tumblr

Earlier this evening, a relatively lengthy post that I wrote yesterday got snipped into just one quotation from Aristotle’s Politics that I used to ground the philosophical approach I took in my argument against a certain kind of libertarianism: “A man without a city is either a beast or a god.” I’ll be interested to see if any of the people who like and reblog that quote actually click through to read what I wrote or if, as so often happens on the social networking side of Tumblr, people just enjoy one-liners and the ease with which they can put them on their own little slice of the internet.

But then something even more interesting happened: Someone who curates the Literature tag on Tumblr apparently liked the quote and decided to feature it there. When they did so, the entire post of mine showed up rather than just the reblogged quote … and so the editor in question immediately decided to un-feature it.

A one-liner from Aristotle that anybody could look up? Feature it! Original content that makes an argument based on that one-liner? No dice! That’s some mighty fine curating.