Blogging Your Way to Straight A’s: The Studyblr Phenomenon

Adaora Ede

As teenagers, many of us are familiar with social media. In addition, many are familiar with the concept of using social media to assist us with our homework. You cheekily Snapchat the math homework answers to some kid in your class and make an all-call for the biology chapter questions via Tweets on Twitter. But would you ever consider starting up a blog and sharing all of your study techniques via pictures and long posts? That’s what many fellow millennials are doing with a newer website called Tumblr to create “studyblrs.”

Tumblr introduces a newer form of social media in the form of microblogging. Gone away are the days of the paragraph by paragraph, san serif styled weblog with Tumblr. With its founding in 2007 by CEO David Karp, introduced to the general public were multimedia blogs utilizing a regenerated live feed, HTML tagging and editing and more. Tumblr is most actively utilized by the Gen X and Y age demographic. In fact, according to a study done by GlobalWebIndex in 2013, about 46%, or nearly half of Tumblr’s 34 million active users are between the ages 16-24, a demographic that is oft quoted as one of the most difficult to reach. But what do most of these people have in common? For one, most of these users grew up around the Internet and spent their childhoods seeing the rapidly moving pace of technological development. But one of the most important aspects that distinguish this age group from others is schooling.

Whether they be sophomores in high school or grad school students, these people are going to school. And in high amounts. As time passes, schools become more rigorous. Students are continuously placed into honors programs and are taking more and more Advanced Placement tests. This is the era of standardized testing, where new initialisms seem to pop up in our test schedules every single day. But who really wants to pick up a book and take notes on pencil and paper in an age where we are surrounded by computers?  I mean, some people I know barely even want to go on Edline and check the homework! Having been in the Gifted and Talented programs and honor student pathways since elementary school, I’ve always heard one token honor kid phrase uttered out in school settings: “I don’t study.” Why is this? In our day, it seems that we are just naturally smart and happen to do well in school. But some people seem smart enough to want to defy this standard in the modern age. This is where studyblrs come in. If you were to very quickly scroll through a studyblr just on a whim, you would probably witness a bright blur of colors. That’s right; this isn’t your mom’s study group. Studyblrs tend to feature Instagram-esque displays of school supplies and computers the same way that another teenage girl would post pictures of their Victoria’s Secret hauls and new makeup from Sephora. Another similarity studyblrs share with the social media world is easily shown in Pinterest, where both sets of users gush over their collective craftiness. But it’s more than just virtual studying. These bloggers truly, in the simplest terms, put in work. Most of the study tools they use and create are analog and that’s shown with the implementation of good ol’ index cards, pens, notebooks, planners, post-its and much, much more (How are you going to be organized with just those?) The concept is what makes studying work for you and many find a public networking space the best for them.

Studyblrs make their main goal to help you, and themselves, of course, accomplish your goals, but there seems to be an aesthetic value to the entire movement. A lot of the studyblrs feature school supplies from style-based brands like Muji, Staedler and Paperchase. Like I said earlier, lots and lots of color. Glittery binders are juxtaposed alongside themed-phone cases and teacups, harking back to the black and white aesthetic blogs that populate another side of Tumblr. To be honest, in making my buying decisions for the new school year, I ended up purchasing a cute little Molang Diary from Amazon to double as my junior year planner as an effect of scrolling through the #studyblr tag on Tumblr on fateful summer night. As a teen, I guess I’m just following the movement, and for the first time, it benefits me academically.