Pinterest, Pictures, and the Textless Web
Or, a very rough outline of the paper I might write for a college class I’m not taking.
1. Places To Store Bookmarks
I’ve used delicious for a while, saving links with tags like: recipes, sewing, craft, diy. (Anything tagged “to read later” never got read.) Right around the time delicious started dying, Pinterest popped up. So did pinboard, which seems to be the place dudes store their links, but shucks, I didn’t feel like paying $9. Pinterest makes sense as a place to store bookmarks for things I want to make, since there is a picture reference! Never mind that “want to make” rarely turns into actually make, and never mind that to get to the source involves way too many clicks. Pinterest, for me and many others, is a place to store aspirations.
2. A Pin Without A Picture
Here’s a hilarious game, also seen @PicturelessPins. Go to the popular page of pinterest and just describe. A wreath made of cocktail umbrellas! A motivational quote in a sans serif font on a navy background! The cast of Friends? A skull cap that looks like a brain! The pictures, perfect and pretty, define pinterest. BUT! What if the recipe/project/stylish lady I want to pin is on a site that blocks pinning? How can I save it? How can I show others my aspirations?? Does a visual aspiration unpinned even truly exist?
3. The Desire To Make Everything Pretty
I follow some lifestyle blogs, the ones written by ladies who blog all the time, who blog about their outfits and their adventures and their beautifully decorated parties. I can chuckle with the best of them about some of this ridiculousness, but this is when I lost it: when one instructed me to make patriotic napkins for my 4th of July party. No, and no, and unsubscribe.
4. “I Only Read It For The Pictures”
A pin can’t exist without a picture, but sometimes things need to be explained, thus, let’s just put directives on all our pictures, or if it’s only text, it still needs to be in graphic form, otherwise, how will anyone pin it? Related: after reading some lifestyle blogs, I decided the only thing worth reading was the pictures.
5. The Textless Web
My boyfriend sent me a link about the “best tumblr app for iphone!” without reading it, and I blindly downloaded the app without reading about it either. Had I read the description, I would have stopped at the line, The app is mainly made for photo Tumblr blogs so if you follow blogs which are mainly text based this may not be the best. (Read: it’s not good for people who read.) (I also probably should have trusted my gut with their lead picture, half naked ladies and cars, that this was not the app for me.) Anyway, I loaded the app and had trouble even getting to the dashboard, only to find it was only pictures. No captions. Any words attached to pictures are inconsequential. Worst tumblr app ever! I thought. But then I wondered: are there people that really only experience the internet through visuals and video?
6. I Like Text.
Yeah.
