Marriage of Opportunity & Publicity: Online Proposal Shakes Up Tumblr

Along with your favorite BlackBook editors, anyone who’s Joseph Gordon Leavitt is on the blogging platform Tumblr. And everyone in the social media spherejerk will be talking about the events that transpired tonight for the remainder of the week. So I thought I would prepare you for the onslaught. Straight white person and Social Media jack of all trades Justin Johnson proposed to his girlfriend on the blogging platform this evening to confusion and uproar. (Happiness is a pill hard swallowed by the unhappy.) The issue at play here is that it would have been one thing if the well-edited video proposal was simply included in a post, but the entire site (or "dashboard" in Tumblr parlance) was reconfigured to accommodate his proposal. And as this exercise, forced upon the Tumblr community, will be the basis for a crush of media fodder and commentary about THE WAY WE LIVE NOW, the proposal is inherently tantamount to an advertising stunt.

The large drop-down propostal currently up on the site for every single person who has a Tumblr to view has received a cascade of criticism and congratulations and is currently at over 9,900 likes. The story here is not the technology behind the proposal or the proliferation of social media. I pray the story of how social media is weaved into every fabric of this contemporary life or some worn ground like that isn’t the point made. Hey we love love. We do. A hearty mazel an’ all that to a very nice kid and his very nice girlfriend. My issue is the implications for the loyal user base of this site and sites like it. This is plain and simple marketing and everyone was a part of it. Credit goes to the business developers because it is cute as shit. But make no mistake that the union between Justin Johnson and his girlfriend was capitalized and co-opted as the thinly veiled marketing initiatives of an up and coming internet company and in my eyes that taints and dismantles what could have been a beautiful thing.