This is the type of post I will immediately scroll past. The reasons?
- The post guilts the reader into reblogging it.
- The wording doesn’t work for a topic so serious. When read, it sounds like 97% of Tumblr should reblog for (or in favor of) cancer. Hunh? Do it for cancer? Additionally, there is no context.
- Assuming percentages are correct (?), how does the author know that someone who presses a few buttons to reblog is truly willing to join in to make a change. And what is that change? What is the true effort forwarded? The post does not speak about how it plans on helping the fight to cure cancer through this post. In fact, I’ve only just made an assumption. Nothing is stated about research, a cure, the fight.
- Because it does not provide this explanation, reblogging the post does nothing other than to ramp up the number of people responding to it.
- Ramping up the number is great if you can take this statistic and effort and put it to good use somehow, but again
- see #3.
- Nothing in the post helps awareness or understanding other than the use of the word, “cancer.” There isn’t even a link to the American Cancer Society.
I can appreciate the sentiment behind the post. I truly can. But if the post was meant to collect a Tumblr stat, we need to be more responsible as readers to distinguish between a true effort and one that is using something as serious as cancer as a means for self-aggrandization. I find ways of contributing that make a quantifiable impact (usually money or participating in fundraising events). Reblogging this type of post and having this “stamp” on a blog isn’t, in my mind, impactful. It dilutes individual motivations to act because it’s all too easy to use a reblog as a substitute for real contributions to an effort so large and needed.
