Nico Addai

This post was originally supposed to be only 3 reasons, but when I started getting into it, I realized why I’ve stuck to the WordPress blogging sphere instead of jumping onto the Tumblr train. Other than the fact that Tumblr is a drowning cesspool of SJWs that are unoriginal and do nothing off Tumblr, and a great platform for up and coming artists, it is home to study blogs, or the aptly named Studyblr. How many times have I seen a one of those little cute posts with fabulous handwriting about how they’re cramming for some test or another?

Here are some of the grips I have with them.

1. They promote cramming for tests

I’ve lost count of how many posts I’ve seen where they were either rewriting their notes or they were complaining about the big test/midterm/quiz they had to study for the next day. If you’re studying so hard, why are you posting on Tumblr a mile a minute?? If you’re confident in your abilities for the next day for your test, say you’re reviewing to encourage your followers to not leave all the highlighting and thinking until the night before and expect to get a good grade, like the Studyblr-ster gets, time and time again. But that could be because:

2. They are mostly high school or first-year college students.

The people who write studyblrs are young, free, and have little responsibilities other than their academics and their blog. When was the last time you saw a graduate student or a mom back in school have time to take endless pictures of their books and Apple accessories? They don’t have time for that! “But Nicole!” you say, “I’ve seen countless mommy blogs and graduate students offering MCAT and LSAT tips on blogs.”

That’s the difference. They do it on professional blogs where they can easily monetize their views as a second or if their lucky, primary source of income. Tumblr is a social platform to build a following…and that’s it. It’s not as easily monetizable as Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or even Facebook. It just is unless you are branching out your following.

3. They are mostly about the humanities and history.

Now, I love the humanities to death. I love a good book as much as the next Wendy, but for there to be few studyblrs that are about the 1am coffee drenched nights of orgo or the head-scratching moments reading a chemistry paper that you may think is not even in English. This leads me to believe that those students either don’t have the time to make a studyblr or:

4. They’re all by girls.

Listen, I’m a girl, so I know this first hand: they care more about their fans thinking they’re intellectual than actually being so. None talk about wandering around the material they’re learning or explaining what they’ve learned. But it also explains why they’re so few Studyblrs that aren’t drenched in pastels and vanilla chai lattes.

Which brings me to my second to last point:

5. They care more about presentation instead of content.

I have never seen a studyblr that has a Lenovo or Windows laptop. All of their pictures look like Apple advertisements or postcards. When they take pictures of their perfectly manicured book stacks and lecture notes, you forget what they’re studying and just focus on the pretty presentation of academic life instead of getting into their academic discipline.

6. They don’t talk specifically about what they’re studying.

All of the pictures of their notes are clean, color coded and neat with the caption ‘Just re-wrote my notes. Ughh they look so ugly! ;)’. They rarely take a picture of their whole notes, only the introduction of the lecture which honestly is the easiest part to understand. What about all the debate on Abraham Lincoln’s motives for the Emancipation Act? Or the uses of the benzene or the philosophical conundrum of the mind? Why not reblog inspiring debates that don’t have anything to do as to whether you should quit school or eat yourself into obesity?

I love pretty notes as much as the next nerd, but I want those notes to mean something. I don’t want them to just be shots for attention that don’t benefit the studier in anyway other then rearranging their notes to look presentable. But hey, to each his own!