There is a subculture of history jokes and memes on Tumblr that follows these principles. In doing so, it is rewiring the mechanisms through which history is communicated and interpreted.

Surely you’ve seen them. Someone posts a link from the popular website #WHATSHOULDWECALLME on someone else’s Facebook wall. It’s a seemingly universal action with a clever GIF, or animated photo, attached to it. For example, “WHEN YOURE THE ONLY ONE OF YOUR ROOMMATES WHOS DRUNK” and a GIF of Jemaine from “Flight of the Conchords” dancing.

Recently, “thinspo” and “thinspiration”-themed Tumblr and Pinterest content has come under close scrutiny. Both online communities have banned the controversial content, usually self-posted photographs of anorexic women taking on the guise of “role models.

As we learn more about the tragic fate of the Wash. U. photo caption site that was closed down by tumblr, maybe it is time for the government to reconsider the pertinence of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed in 1998 to update copyright law for electronic content.

A popular student-run website was taken down after its host claimed that it used copyrighted material illegally. Wash U Photo Captions, a blog started by senior Alex Christensen, has garnered up to 1,000 page views per day since its debut last December.