I’ve been thinking a lot about why I hate Pinterest. Is it unfair? Am I being unfair? Maybe. But here’s what I’ve come up with.
1. Pinterest is for Women
I don’t mean that in a deragoratory way. Not the way I would mean it when I say, “Crying is for women” or more generally, “outward expressions of emotion are for women.” What I mean is, Pinterest membership consists mostly of women and tends to lean heavily towards the interests of women, and is therefore not really directed at me. In fact, a Pew study shows that where 5% of male internet users are on Pinterest, 19% of female internet users are. It’s not an exact number to say 4 women for every man because that would require proof that internet users are 50/50 men/women, but it’s a ballpark.
One could argue that I’m making a statement here based on stereotypical gender roles like, “Girls like pretty dresses.”
I am making that statement.
But not based on history or machismo or whatever. Based on the fact that Pinterest is used by women, most of the reposting is done by women, and what we see is a lot of pretty dresses.
If you have any doubt check Pinterest’s front page at any given time. Log out, come back to the main page every half hour or so. Dresses, recipes, babies, weddings, fingernails.
Pinterest is the land of ladies. Which is fine. Really, that only puts me on the disinterested front. The dispinterested front. How then do we move from no real interest to active dislike?
2. Pinterest is a broken social tool.
Since the first idiot took the first idiotic picture of a burrito and posted it on Facebook, we’ve been making fun of food pictures on Facebook. What a waste of time. Who cares what you had for lunch? Right? Well, Pinterest is that times 10 because pictures posted are not only of the same boring stuff, but oftentimes that stuff was not created NOR consumed by the pinner. So all I’ve learned by seeing this pin is that you pushed the repin button. It’s hard to imagine information less useful than “I guess Brandon ate that burrito” but we’ve figured it out, by god. Now I can say, “I guess Brandon WOULD LIKE TO eat that burrito, theoretically.”
Seeing something you were eating was a colossal waste of time, no doubt. But at least there was potential to get an idea about a person on some small level. The food they liked. The kinds of restaurants they went to. SOMETHING. Not much, but still some modicum of information could be exchanged. A picture of food you didn’t make nor consume. Great. Good.
3. Pinterest is primarily a catalogue of unfinished or unbegun projects.
Do pinners keep boards that exist solely of completed projects? If so, I’d be willing to bet that most of those boards would be sparsely populated.
I’m not saying that I’m not guilty of this to some extent, and everyone should have goals. I use Goodreads to keep track of books I would like to read but haven’t. However, that To-Read list is about half the size of the list of books I’ve actually read. Not to mention that reading is something I engage in already as opposed to starting something brand new that I’m not equipped for, such as quilting or getting married.
In the library world we do a little something called Weeding. This is the process of removing old, shit books from the collection. Stuff that isn’t moving, the idea being that deserving books would potentially perform better if they’re not being choked out by unwanted items.
Pinterest users should also be weeding their Pinterest stuff. Let’s face it, if you haven’t gotten to that cute Mason jar project in the last 2 years, it ain’t happening. And at some point, doesn’t this just become a list of things you’ll never get done? It’s kind of sad, really. Like watching that show about 1001 places you must visit before you die, realizing you’ve seen 0 of them, eating another chili-cheese Frito and considering how much of the world you’ll just never get to.
4. Pinterest is lifestyle porn, which is worse than regular porn.
People use the term Lifestyle Porn often these days. Or Food Porn. I guess what this means is that you’re looking at a picture of food because it pleases some part of your brain that can imagine what it would be like to eat said food. I guess there’s also an element there where we’re saying you can look at something without having the consequences of inviting that thing into your life. In the case of food, you can look at a plate of nachos without having to deal with the calories. In the case of old fashioned pornography, you can have an eight-milf experience without inviting the turmoil into your relationships. Uh, sort of.
Here’s the difference: It seems apparent to me that people who post food porn harbor illusions that they may one day actually make or consume the star of said porn whereas the watchers of regular porn don’t believe that they are ACTUALLY going to have sex with a porn star. They fantasize about it, they wonder, I’m sure, but they don’t, in the sober light of day, really believe that they will star in an X-Rated feature, nor a real-life version of one which is pretty much the same except everyone is 28% less attractive. Nor is the reality really a part of the fantasy. The fantasy is just that: fantasy.
Before we get too excited, I know there ARE people for whom all of this isn’t true. People who do think they will live a pornographic lifestyle. Those people are crazy, and we have no problem judging those people, right? It would be insane if someone spent hours poring through pictures of naked women doing ungodly things with Shop Vacs and collecting them in some sort of database.
Right?
Food and lifestyle porn isn’t stigmatized that way, but maybe it should be a little. I’m not saying that posting dozens of recipes a day is the same as masturbating in front of the computer all day. But it’s not miles and miles away. If pornography, whether it be lifestyle or filthy dirty great porn, crosses the line from life supplement to being something that REPLACES some part of your life or substitutes for something missing, you’ve got a problem.
5. Pinterest promotes acceptable geekery under the guise of general geekdom.
I consider myself having grown up as somewhat of a nerd. I didn’t play Dungeons & Dragons or Magic, but really only because I didn’t have the attention span.
Nerdiness isn’t all about that shit though. I think that being a nerd, an outcast of sorts, was and is mostly about knowing the very specific and painful feeling of knowing that nobody else really cares what you’re up to. It’s not like in the movies where some shithead in a leather jacket pushed you into a locker because you were reading a Batman comic. That guy didn’t know who you were, really.
So that’s why I identify with that group. When people take up the geek mantle in a serious way, my first reaction is always to be skeptical.
I’m sorry, but if I see one more Doctor-Who-related craft I’m going to blow my fucking brains out with that sonicare vibrator thing or whatever the hell he carries around. Seriously, we’re good. All full up.
Do you know what I was doing when I was 14? Playing with action figures. And was that a thing I could post pictures of? Fuck no. Nor would I want to.
There’s value to an online community of geekery, but I also think that in some way it’s a little devalued when it’s transformed that way. Geek culture used to be something that people could escape into a little bit, without having to share with other people. Or to share with selected people. Hell, maybe to even form good friendships over. But what is left for people to think of as their own? How am I supposed to enjoy the Walking Dead and ask people if they saw it if immediately following the show there’s a talk show about it!? What would I have left to say about it? What’s the value of making my own King’s Quest map to get through the goddamn stupid endless desert if I can just google that shit?
People say now is the best time ever to be a geek. I disagree. I think it’s worse than ever. Because maybe you felt like a total dork for how much time you played Disney’s Aladdin on Genesis in the 90’s, but you might not have had a whole lot else. Geekdom has traded in its emotional, personal significance for cultural cachet, and that’s very sad.
It’s not completely the fault of Pinterest. But Pinterest is definitely a popular vector and aggregator for acceptable geekery and the self-proclaimed geek.
6. Crowdsourcing makes for inconsistency
There’s a real problem with Pinterest recipes.
If I get a recipe book and try a couple things, I can get a pretty good idea whether I’m going to like the lion’s share of shit in there. If the first couple recipes suck, screw it.
Pinterest is impossible because who collects more than one recipe generated by the same person? So recipe number one posted by Friend X was shit, but that doesn’t mean anything about recipes two through infinity.
And really, all we should be getting excited about is how well the food is photographed. Because that’s the big sell.
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Okay, that’s all, really. It boils down to one basic thing, I guess. Pinterest is an aggregator for things we will never do and the lives we will never have. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but when you can look at your ideal life laid out that way, the perfect clothes, the perfect meals, the cutest bathrooms- all that shit is there. On the screen. Not in your life. It’s not about doing anything, really, doing real shit. Making the perfect Pinterest plan has BECOME the work of making an ideal life. The hard part about making the perfect bathroom isn’t figuring out which colors to paint the walls. It’s about painting the goddamn walls already.