Dashcon and The 2013 Tumblr Community: Giving You One Extra Hour in the Ball Pit

by Julia Etrusco 

 
Image source: Tumblr user @heritageposts

My guilty pleasure is making my professors read about my niche interests. From the shitty 2017 Death Note adaptation to how Fan Fictions can take on fandoms of their own, I’ve quite literally written about almost all of my cringe interests and the latest one was Dashcon so here it is:

(Shoutout to Professor Frank and Tarik from the FMS department for enabling my cringe essay topics)
 
Originally called Tumbl-Con, the fan convention later named Dashcon was meant to gather Tumblr users in one place for 3 full days on a fateful weekend in 2014 of fun fandom activities with the promise of allowing users to meet people with the same interests as them in person instead of online. Nothing about this ill-fated convention ended up going according to plan due to many reasons but one of the biggest problems was how the entire point of Dashcon was to imitate the Tumblr platform in real life. The benefits of Tumblr as a networked public that centers people’s self curated community as well as individuals anonymity is what made it appealing and different from other social media sites. Because of the incredibly poor management of the event, as well as their inability to replicate the online community aspect of Tumblr that made it unique, Dashcon was a failure on all fronts ultimately resulting in its current internet meme status. To understand this event, it's important to understand both the affordances of Tumblr as a platform as well as the sense of community that was fostered on the blogging site. For the sake of my analysis I will be focusing on features that were prominent on Tumblr from 2009-2013 before Dashcon occurred.

Tumblr Affordances and Dynamics

As stated by technology and social media scholar danah boyd, “Networked Publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies”. They are “the space constructed through networked technologies and the imagined collective that emerges as a result”. Essentially, these Networked Publics serve the same purpose as any other forms of publics', they allow people to gather and connect with others. However, what makes networked publics special is that they do not need to conform to the rules of time or space. When online, you are free to connect with others even if they are not within close proximity to you, and conversations and interactions can occur with a lot of time in between responses. That is especially true within Tumblr’s platform since one of its most prominent features consists of reblogging posts and adding onto said posts through the use of comments and tags. The most important dynamics within Tumblr’s networked public would be invisible audiences and creators as well as collapsed contexts due to comments and reblogs.



 
Since one of its unique features is the ability to remain anonymous, both content creators and their followers retain some sense of privacy that can lead to greater interactions on the platform. The possibility of anonymity allows its users to explore their interests unabashedly which was a huge hit with teens and young adults. Tumblr users would rarely feel any sort of need to censor themselves within the platform since, more often than not, there was nothing that connected who they were in real life to who they were on the site. From my own experiences of using Tumblr, I can certainly recall seeing many people who felt as though the site was a safe space to explore their interests and help them find their own identity. Tumblr has always functioned more as a place to meet new people with shared interests as you rather than usual social media sites such as Facebook and twitter that primarily want you to broaden your connections with the people already in your social sphere. In terms of collapsed context, with Tumblr's reblogging and commenting feature, people can add whatever they want to other peoples posts, ensuring that “ dialogue is less about direct conversations/interaction between users and more about signaling sharing affinities to other users”. Tumblr’s comments and reblogs are less about creation and more about curation. With a single comment you can shift the narrative of the original post, shifting the focus to the comment that you just added. The reblogging protocol on the site “shapes the way interactions occur and social ties form”. The features found on Tumblr also work to keep you in a specific circle of people with whatever niche interest you are into. Your Tumblr dash is filled with completely self curated content, keeping you in a like minded community of people who enjoy the same things as you.

Tumblr Community
 
Tumblr as a platform “fosters a sense of community among users by providing a venue where they can create and consume content and that simultaneously makes it easy to discover others who share their content interests”. It brings people together in a unique way that differs greatly from other platforms, creating different modes of interaction between users that aren't found anywhere else. Soon enough the site became a “safe haven” of sorts for teens and young adults who had often been bullied in real life for their interests and were searching for a place where they could be themselves and explore their own interests and identity without judgment. Research from 2013 shows that within those years Tumblr was strong with female identifying teens and young adults from the ages 18-25 who were interested in self-expression. This strong sense of community was especially strong within Fandom Tumblr. Many users felt a sense of belonging in the site and would frequently make posts about wanting a place for Tumblr users to get together. The biggest example of this is a post originally made sometime in 2012 which was reposted in early 2013 about a potential “Tumblr university”. Several people on the site hopped on the trend of describing what life would be like at a university specifically for Tumblr users and many thought it would be fun to get to be around the people they could only know online, showing how the sense of community on the platform was rather strong. Eventually some young Tumblr user thought a Tumblr convention would be a great idea. Since the community on Tumblr that these teens and young adults had fostered was such a welcoming and communal space, what could possibly go wrong with putting on a Tumblr convention?

 
Dashcon Fiasco

   Approximately a year before the actual event, Dashcon was announced to be actually happening on July 11-13, 2014 in Schaumburg IL. The intention behind this convention was to unite people with similar interests and many people considered this con to be somewhere they would be able to meet their online friends in real life. Ryan Broderick from the Garbage Day online newsletter interviewed the creator of the original Tumbl-Con blog, the original organizer, and the one who ordered the infamous ball pit. Lochlan O’Neil’s idea was to have “each fandom come and they'll have their own fandom booth and they can have their own fandom merch and be their own committees”. At the time, O’Neil was just a 15 year old girl with a lot of enthusiasm. She had met her best friend on Tumblr and wanted others to be able to do the same. Since she was underaged, the actual management of the event was later passed on to a group of adults, however she was in charge of the social media marketing for the event as well as the person behind the original Tumbl-Con blog. The adults in charge of managing the convention ultimately did not know how to run a large-scale event which resulted in volunteers, staff, and panelists being treated extremely poorly. The money for the event was not handled properly so staff were not given the compensations they were promised or even paid at all, and some were not even given a room to sleep in. The biggest problem however was the lack of attendees. Dashcon organizers had originally estimated that around 3000 to 7000 people would show up for the event, however, when recounting their horrible weekend at Dashcon, attendees confirmed that there were roughly only about 500 people present. This meant that the event would not raise enough money to pay off the things they needed for a typical convention, such as hotel bills, rental bills, refunding canceled events for attendees, and paying their staff. Artist vendors were also not making any money due to a lack of attendees so most of them left early, leaving guests at the convention with barely anything to do—well… except maybe sit in the infamous Dashcon ball pit for an extra hour. Leading up to the event, the Dashcon’s Tumblr blog made several posts hinting at the fact that they would have a rather large ball pit area so guests could sit in it and meet new people. However the reality of this ball pit was a small and sad looking kiddie pool with some colorful balls thrown in that stood in the center of a very large event room, making it look even smaller. As soon as people at the convention realized that that was the promised ball pit, images of it began circulating online and it became the image most people associate with DashCon.

 In Retrospect...
 
 
 
The network affordances that make Tumblr a unique platform with a strong community of users would never have been able to be translated to real life. After Dashcon the sense of community within Tumblr started to break due to feelings of incredible embarrassment because of the failed event. Without the protection of anonymity granted by the platform, people who attended Dashcon were ultimately embarrassed to be connected to the event. The people on the site who didn't attend, ended up mocking those who did, and the management issues and irresponsibility of the organizers were projected onto the overall user base of Tumblr. Despite that, some Tumblr users who attended the convention have stated that they had a memorable experience and that the event did manage to bring people together to laugh at the entire situation. However, in some ways, the iconic image of the ball pit represents what happens when you try and replicate networked publics in real life. You end up hyping it up too much and in the end it’s often only going to be a sad attempt of getting people to connect without the features that social media provides that makes connections easier.

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