Pinterest: two fingers to you and I

Pinterest is the current golden child of the social media circuit. And it’s hard to say why. Well, actually, it’s not. It’s very easy to say why, and it’s down to 2 factors:

1 – we’re all lazy.

2 – we all hate each other.

Disagree? Don’t, you’re wrong if you do.

Pinterest isn’t about shouting from the rooftops about how great you are. It’s about something different, something opposite to one of the inherent symptoms of the human disease we’re all used to. Some people call this symptom narcissism, some call it egoism. I call it, “The big I Am”. You’ll have encountered it before, someone boasting or accentuating their own self-value completely out of context, with no reason whatsoever and with no regards for what you and I would call, “the truth.” I personally have no time for people trying to justify their own oxygen requirements in such fashion, and I doubt you do either. And that’s exactly why Pinterest is so popular – because it caters to the complete opposite of this. Pinterest isn’t about the big I Am in the same way that say Flickr or YouTube can be, it’s about the big This Is.

See, other similar visual-asset-sharing services like the two mentioned above – and others such as Instagram, Viddy etc. – are about showing the world how good the user is in some way. It’s about saying, “this is me,” “this is mine,” “this is what I do,” “this is how creative I am,” or something there or thereabouts. They encourage you to upload your own assets, be they photos, videos or other images. Moreover, these assets are carefully cropped and selected to ensure that they are the best possible representation of yourself.

I have a self-imposed rule on Facebook that I never un-tag a genuine photo of myself. This has led to some admittedly grim photos of me being widely available (caveat: all photos of me are grim photos of me), but my faux-ideology is that if I did it, I should face the consequences. From my limited, and admittedly somewhat external, grasp of what is normal behavior, this is a relatively scarcely adopted idea, with most people only wanting to show the world the best side of themselves. Unfortunately, this is not the real side of themselves, and this is where Facebook falls down as a realistic representation of real lives online (which is, admittedly, fair enough – God knows, I’m already enough like me in the real world to let that spill over into interspace). Flickr meanwhile encourages mass upload with less curation, but it becomes an overload of what is essentially a relatively boring subject – you and I. But both iterations of this either under-or-over-edited sharing process are self-involved. And frankly, we’re all sick of it. We may not want to admit it, but we are.

Enter Pinterest. Pinterest’s primary modus operandi isn’t the upload, but the pin. A way of drawing attention to something someone else has done and sharing it with other people who may be interested; the, “hey, look at this,” not the, “hey, look at me”. There will be some who argue that psychologically this “reveals more about ourselves than our own photos ever could.” But the likelihood is they’re quasi-educated psycho-babble PhD marketing students trying to prove to mum, dad and Billy-Jo Grant-Distributer that they’re not eating money and shitting vacuous nonsense. The fact is, Pinterest is about sharing things that we have seen, but are not ourselves directly involved with (forget the fact that it’s almost completely illegal and that the whole thing will eventually be court-slapped). Of course, people can upload album after album of themselves onto Pinterest, but will that be an interesting pin? Will it be pinteresting? Possibly to some, but not to the mass market.

The fact that you have to enter a description prevents noise pollution too. Spam-pinning will require equally as much effort as genu-pins (… that was shameful and I apologise). Don’t think the semantics are chance either. They’re pin-boards, not albums. These are not meant to be carefully curated exhibitions, more on-the-fly, off-the-cuff and in-the-moment flashes of, ‘hey, this is cool’. It’s simple to add and encourages adding the most random, nonsensical nonsense. It doesn’t encourage us to see things we’d like based on people we know, as Facebook does. Rather, it encourages us to see things we like based on other, similar things we like. It doesn’t even allow batch uploads in the way that Flickr and the like does!

So you see, the reason you’re so interested in your friends on Pinterest is that you’re not interested in your friends at all. It’s a simple way of sharing interesting content in a contextualised, natural and relatable manner, without having to worry about personal relationships or any of the nonsense, obligations or worries they entail. Bliss.