Barely Pinterested: my lukewarm feelings toward Pinterest

I’m a scrap collector. Since I was a little kid, I have always kept a book where I collected and archived ideas, memories, short stories, photos, and anything printed (or sometimes handwritten) that interested me. A mix between a scrapbook, picture album, and diary: a comfort book. All the small and printed things I loved in one place.

Back in 1987 I was a sarcastic 15 year old. I collected silly magazine headlines, photos of comedians I liked, birthday cards, and notes from my friends. Still makes me happy to page through...

Kellie V. over at le zoe musings recently did a beautiful post about her Vision Books. It made me so happy to see someone who collected ideas and thoughts similarly to me. (Albeit, so much more elegantly!) Photos, ideas, clippings, and to-do’s all wrapped cleanly in a book beautiful enough to publish as a quarterly.

My “book” serves the same purpose, but its pages are housed in an old binder from a former employer. It is dark and dingy on the outside and I have filled it to the gills with things I love. I like to use plain pages for small items to be glued onto (as a collage), and then many clear plastic document holders (that have pre-punched three ring binder holes) for stuffing pages into. Sometimes I’ll just hole punch printed pages and file them right into the binder. No rules. Just good stuff.

My dingy old idea book.

So when Pinterest  hit the scene, with blinding speed and popularity, I thought I would love it. In addition to my collection of physical scraps, I am notorious for keeping hundreds and hundreds of “bookmarks” for web pages that I like. Perhaps I would use Pinterest to my advantage, rather than have bookmarked links so long that a. I no longer reference them, b. I no longer remember why I saved them or c. the links are now broken due to their old, old age? But Pinterest was exclusive! By invite only! Wow, it sounded so intriguing–it must be special. So, I begged for an invite from friends and family, and finally, I was in.

First off, after all the hype, I found Pinterest cumbersome to use. Perhaps I didn’t research the usability of the application very well, I don’t know. It just wasn’t very intuitive to me, so it ended up frustrating me a bit. I didn’t like that I had to categorize the pins. I wasn’t sure how to create new boards. I didn’t like that I had to write some sort of verbiage on each pin. But I suffered along through those first pins…and began my journey. I pinned a total of 6 things. I had been thinking about winter a lot (I love winter) so I had found some cold, yet cozy winter home scenes that I enjoyed. But, then, I just lost interest. I never pinned again. I never referred back to my pinned items. My Pinterest was a cyber graveyard of cool things and “ideas.” It was going the way of my dead end bookmarked links in my browser.

But, oddly enough, despite my lack of activity, I collected 42 followers. And boy, were other people pinning! I see Pinterest updates all day in my facebook feed. I’m intrigued to see what everyone else is interested in, what recipes they are stockpiling, what colors they might paint their new baby’s room, the fun classroom activities they are going to do for Arbor Day. I found it to be a delicious glimpse into other’s personalities. It was such a public way to share. And it was fascinating.

It’s odd, but when I show someone a page of my physical idea book, I often tense up when they start thumbing through the rest of it. These are personal snippets, a glimpse into my very core, my own likes, my stuff. A reflection of me. It feels odd to give others a chance to view something so personal. And this is not necessarily a bad feeling–I would never stop someone from looking through my idea book, I mean there are no state secrets or anything close to being relatively juicy–it just makes me feel a bit vulnerable to share things that were collected so methodically and thoughtfully.

So, while Pinterest is a pretty novel idea, I just can’t love it. I can’t. Maybe I am just being a curmudgeon about technology versus print: the joy I have towards reading and looking at things on paper, the feel of paging through a book, or the act of clipping and placing something special enough for keeping into a record that I can hold. Maybe I feel that Pinterest is not that different than the hundreds of bookmarked links that I have, slowly atrophying in my toolbar. Maybe I know in my heart that the things I really love, are the ones that I need to work harder to keep. Maybe I feel that all of these pins are collected so easily, they will stagnate on Pinterest forever, with nary another view.

Whatever the reason, I’ll just continue collecting the way that feels right for me. And when I feel sick, or tired, or a little bummed, nothing picks me up like paging through that idea book. Lovingly pieced together by my own hands.