NANO (Dec 2016)
Crafty Bricolage: Pinterest as Digital Scrapbooking
Abstract
This essay is a meditation on Pinterest as a platform for collecting and organizing desires, an inquiry into how the site negotiates the dialectic between having and being, looking and doing. As an academic with interests in the history of American literary and visual culture, I want to think about what Pinterest has in common with the curiosity cabinet and the scrapbook in the nineteenth century. What did individuals seek to preserve and communicate about themselves and about their environments through those mediums, and to what extent do those motivations map onto this technology? As a parent of two small children who appreciates Pinterest as a place to catalog possible art projects, I’m interested in the relationship between inspiration and creation: how does the platform foment and channel consumer desire while billing itself as a design-minded outlet for savvy self-expression? How frequently and in what shapes do my pins and boards translate from screen to table or yard?
