Over Christmas break, my friend Cali introduced me to the new trend of virtual networking: Pinterest. This site describes itself as follows;
“Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social services in the world. Our mission is to connect people through their common interests.
Every day, people use Pinterest to discover new recipes to cook, products to buy, and places to visit. Pinterest is loved by millions of regular people: school teachers, gardeners, techies...even our Moms!”
I am a visual person as a student I find myself always creating imaginary metaphors and illustrations so as to better comprehend concepts being discussed. As a visualizer I found the Pinterest interface to be both unique and satisfying. It is an online ‘pinboard’ that collects and organizes photographs that link consumers with websites, blogs, or online stores from which that photograph came. Along with the thousands of photographic links already available for the mindless surfing, Pinterest also provides a “pin it” button that can be kept on your internet browser. This button serves the purpose to create a photographic link, onto my pin board, of any website or product that I dub “pin-worthy”. For example, the IT department here at school has done a marvelous job at revamping our “Course Websites” page. On having discovered the remarkable improvements, I could virtually affirm their success by clicking my “Pin it” browser button, then choosing an image from the CIU Web Page, and posting it to any of my categorizes pin boards. Any one who then browses through my pin boards could discover my link to the CIU Course Websites, click on the Photographic link and see for themselves the improvements.
Overall, Pinterest is a fascinating new form of both networking and organizing. One can collect their virtual interests and pool them into one location to be organized and later referenced. Furthermore friends and family can see my interests and ‘re-pin’ them as their own, in some strange virtual way affirming that they both agree with my admiration and desire it for themselves.
I like the community of Pinterest, I enjoy the beauty of its images and the ideas and crafts it suggests, but something about the concept as a whole feeds the lustfull consumer in me. I’ve known many girls (not excluding myself) who spend far too much of their study breaks surfing the boards of Pinterest marking their territory on cute hand bags or new recipes that they must try. In a form this is lustful, idolizing images and collecting the shadows of products we hope to obtain in the future. Worst of all there is no consequence for the practice of such lustful behavior as it has become the virtual norm.
What do you think of this arena of virtual accumulation?
I’m still undecided as to whether its community of idea, dream, and product networking is helpful or harmful.
-Lael Primrose