Pinterest is yet another glorious way to waste time
Pinterest is the geek-fix de jour. What was a promising picture-based social network last year (TechCrunch rated it as the best startup and Time listed it in its top 50 websites) has entered the mainstream. Even the US military has got an account, presumably so it has somewhere to post its pictures of abused enemy combatants.
So what is it? Well, as the name (kind of) suggests, its premise is that it mimics a pinboard, in which you can stick all your favourite images – a bit like the thing people have hanging in their kitchen. That is, of course, if you are the kind of person who sticks pictures of “my favourite haircuts” to the walls of your home, which is how I imagine psychopaths start out, before they get around to skinning the local wildlife. You’re encouraged to have multiple “boards” for different subjects – an entire building filled with pinboards devoted to various fetishes and foibles.
So far Pinterest is short on celebrity users, with the site more geared towards sharing with people you already know. My homepage is currently filled with dozens upon dozens of pictures of glass medicine bottles posted by a “friend” (someone who I haven’t met in five years and never got on with very well, which will eventually become the accepted definition of the word). Why is he posting pictures of medicine bottles? I don’t know. Maybe he’s setting up an apothecary, or maybe he’s looking for containers for the various poisons he’s using to trap his neighbours’ pets. Who can say?
Other “boards” are filled with creepy marionettes or close-up images of insects or derelict buildings or hand-made jewelery. It’s glorious – and it’s addictive. It feeds the part of the brain that craves creating something pretty, even if that thing isn’t particularly useful. The internet if full of them: projects people spend inordinate numbers of hours creating for no obvious financial return; from the electro remix of quotes from Master Chef (which is probably the single greatest thing I have ever seen/heard/experienced) to the recreation of famous movie scenes using Lego men.
People have always devoted time making incredible follies but the internet lets you broadcast them to the world. Pinterest is another tool for disseminating the bizarre and brilliant ideas that make the internet feel like home. And, for that reason, I’m in.