If You Like It Then You Shoulda Put a Pin On It
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
So, Pinterest.
I have been, like many people, looking at this latest social media phenomenon from the outside in, and as I learned with Twitter and Tumblr, these things don’t always make a lot of sense until you jump in to see what the water feels like.
In fact, along with the media flurries about how Pinterest SHOCK has lots of women and SHOCK is the new big internet traffic light system, one of the most common comments I’ve seen about it has been “OMG I so don’t want to know what Pinterest is, one more social media is going to break me.”
Which, fair enough.
So I didn’t know much, going in, about it apart from, well, it’s about arranging pictures. And there’s a remarkably fan-lite community (cos, as Kaia remarked to me, they’re all still on Tumblr). I asked the universe to put the Galactic Suburbia books on a pinboard last week, and our listener Celia leaped into action, showing if nothing else that if the book selling industry really is going down the tubes, it’s not Galactic Suburbia’s fault.
After that, I had the taste for it! So I signed up myself.
My initial interest, as with most social media, was how I could use it to promote my projects (though actually Twitter only wormed its way into my heart because of live-tweeted Arsenal games, and I went to Tumblr mostly because my friends Kaia & Millie did and it was the only way to maintain communications with them but let’s pretend it’s all about business stuff!).
I did experiment with a bit of that - putting together a Creature Court board, for instance, as promoting those books is kind of a big focus for me right now, and a board linking to all the Doctor Who posts I have written across various blogs. And I couldn’t resist putting together all the Twelve Planets book covers so far, and an assortment of my own quilting projects. But then I got a bit creatively distracted…
Because, as it turns out, Pinterest has a fabulous use for authors which has nothing to do with social media or promotion. Design scrapbooks! Or creative collages. Or whatever. I have always yearned a bit for the Jenny Crusie process of creating a formal design scrapbook of a novel before you write it - casting your characters, putting key visuals together, and so on. It always sounded so fascinating when she did it, and yet I never quite found the time (or, you know, put the time aside) to do such a thing. There was an indulgence about it, I think, that part of me felt I couldn’t justify. Don’t ask me how my mind works!
So yes, from The Creature Court I went on to a bunch of other projects in various stages of being written - such as my Verona book, Nancy Napoleon, and this other thing I’m not quite supposed to talk about yet.
And I am COMPLETELY in love with this process. I’m gonna be pinning every story or novel I write to the wall for the forseeable future. There’s something so charming about being able to assemble a bunch of pictures to sum up a mode or a setting or a character. And sure, I could do it in Scrivener or a folder on my desktop, but this is the 21st century, where we show our workings (and knickers) in public, and these are mine!
Another big difference between this and other social media is that there’s less of a focus on real time participation - unlike a dead blog or a Tumblr/Twitter account that hasn’t been used for ages, Pinterest feels very much like something you can pick up and put down at your leisure, without being locked into a daily or weekly commitment.
There’s some problematic stuff about Pinterest, I’ll admit, as has been pointed out to me - and I thought was particularly well articulated here. As with all social media, there are issues to do with copyright and the ownership of images, and indeed whether Pinterest itself holds too much ownership over your ideas. It’s something I’m wary of and will be thinking about when I post - but on the other hand, this is the internet, and the sharing of pictures back and forth is hardly any more problematic with Pinterest than it is on Tumblr, Twitter or WordPress.
What I do like is how easy it is (indeed, it’s the default) to credit back to the source of the image - and I think the user-friendliness of the design of Pinterest is part of why it feels so fun to use. I have my little ‘pin this’ gizmo on my Firefox toolbar, and if I hit it to repin a pic from somewhere on the internet, it does link directly back. I’ve also enjoyed having conversations with crafters etc. on the site about the pic - it feels more personal than just grabbing things off Google Image Search and I like that personal touch, where you can compliment the person who made the awesome handbag, even as you put it on your board of ‘things I want to make some day’.
So, not unproblematic, but there are so many lovely things about it as a space (so far, knock wood, honeymoon period n’ all) and as a tool for my writing that I suspect, like Twitter and Tumblr and all those other things ending in r, Pinterest is going to be folded in to my online profile and lifestyle.
Because, PRETTIES!