Dealing with networks means that nothing is stable, everything is constantly moving in response to massive amounts of data

"Broadly accounting for any act where a person organises visual content on the internet in a way that creates meaning through the differences and similarities of their collected images."

"curating is now linguistically deluded beyond the point of return to an artistic context

people are creating meaning themselves – online, inside, outside

rarefied and highly specialized skill, would all of a sudden go viral

Not because I don’t like magazines. In many ways, I like them better. But they’re too grounded in space and time, too organized and linear, too collaborative and professional to deliver the synaptic frisson available from the stream-of-consciousness image blog.

A friend of a friend calls his addiction to sites like these “avenues for procrastination,” but I think there’s something else involved. Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape, the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from monotony, frustration and boredom

So maybe we are like the rats, and what we’re seeking while idly yet compulsively cruising Pinterest is really just the reliably unpredictable jumble of emotions that their wistful, quirky juxtapositions evoke. Maybe that is our rectangularity.

This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing.

frivolous and feminine

People don’t post stuff because they wish they owned it, but because they think they are it, and they long to be understood, which is different.

In fact, the company discourages people from posting images they have created themselves, preferring that they venture out into the wilds of the Internet looking for beautiful things to bring back to the cave.

“Curation” does imply something far more deliberate than these inspiration blogs, whose very point is to put the viewer into an aesthetic reverie unencumbered by thought or analysis. These sites are not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so.

But products are no longer the point. The feeling is the point. And now we can create that feeling for ourselves, then pass it around like a photo album of the life we think we were meant to have but don’t, the people we think we should be but aren’t.

They are a significant site in the development of a mode of media driven not only by ideological or representational forms of control, but also by the effort to manage participation and social space in order to harness and modulate an ongoing circulation of meaning, attention and data.

On the social and mobile web, images are more than just representations of people, events and places. They also capture attention, and generate data and networks. An image is a device that holds in place a network of associations and affects in time and place, that can be tracked and responded to.

Hashtags, tags, likes, comments and shares are 'manual' devices users employ to position images within a larger flow. Algorithms are 'automated' devices that determine how images circulate within a network based on a set of rules.

Users often know that posting certain kinds of content at certain times or places will attain more or less interaction from peers in their network. Efforts users make to position content--for instance, by tagging or liking an image--create data that algorithms use to manage the circulation of content in general by recognising patterns of interaction over time.

you can take your interests and use them to explain more about you and what you have to offer

In other words, she might pin an appetizing image of a gluten-free dish on a Pinterest board, and a user will click on the picture taking them to her website, which features information about her services such as food and nutrition writing, corporate consulting, foodservice consultation, and nutrition counseling and lifestyle coaching—particularly for people with celiac disease and food allergies.

Pinboards can be used by educators to plan lessons. Teachers can pin sites for later referral. Students can pin and organize sources and collaborate on projects

Pinterest does not generate its own content; rather, it draws from many resources around the web and compiles them in one convenient location for users. By transferring information from restricted access to a more open public sphere, information transaction costs have decreased drastically.

By only being shown items users are comfortable with, users are unexposed to foreign ideas. Many users are unaware of the personalization.

organizing

set up boards that allow multiple people to pin

tutorials

write a note to yourself about the pin so you will remember exactly why you chose it

organize resources for presentations, projects, essays