‘Woke’ was invented by angry schoolgirls on Tumblr – The Spectator World

For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior government advisor. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following her, reading and engaging. These were the days of Tumblr, a youth blogging website that functioned like a dysfunctional think tank. I first found out about Tumblr in 2012, when I was in Year 7 – the British equivalent of sixth grade; a girl in my year group started a blog about her depression and anxiety and linked it from her public Facebook. I wanted in on her mental anguish – the posts she shared would ring safeguarding alarm bells today, but they seemed impossibly grown-up at the time. At my all-girls school, having a Tumblr blog was a smug in-group identifier, signifying taste, depth and intelligence: if you already struggled making friends it gave you a leg-up over your happy, popular classmates, who mostly just logged onto the internet to post on each other’s Facebook walls. “You’re on Tumblr,” as one anonymous blogger
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