MANILA, Philippines - There’s a strange religious overtone when it comes to being called a “follower.” And the appeal’s pretty simple, really—not everyone can be the leader of the herd. The Scriptures have established, nurtured and curated it; while the Internet selected its most vulnerable parts, democratized it then marketed it as a social networking revolution, and hence, a new meaning of “follower” was born. It couldn’t have been a coincidence, then, that the commandment of following is one of the web’s most popular activities, a leading cause of declining attention spans and learned self-publicity.
The celebrity-saturated Twitter easily comes to mind, with its real-time rally of what the stars had for breakfast, #winning hash tags, and just the all-around inability to shut our traps. And then there’s Tumblr, David Karp’s brainchild that launched in 2007—the year that would mark the beginning of self-expression turning into mass subscription. Not too many celebrities flock the site, but it hasn’t stopped the microblogging platform from getting rid of the middleman through the canon laws of liking, reblogging, meme-manufacturing, and posting original content. Tumblr succeeds as an outlet for creating cultural niches online, and thus, the genesis of the self-made tastemakers and editors-in-chief—in fashion, music, movies, art and photography.
We at Young Star thought it was about time to meet the Royal Tumblr Family. The kings and queens of site traffic, and appropriately armed with weapons to keep their kingdoms in order: the cameras, the laptops and the iPhones and Blackberries for good measure. If the Internet is their castle, then empowerment is their creed. After all, the medium is the message to the royal subjects: whoever you are, you are your most socially lucrative asset. Follow the leader? How about being one yourself.