Public Curation and Private Collection: The Production of Knowledge on Pinterest.Com

  • “Social curation is the process through which the general public, rather than web publishers themselves, tag, organize, and share content with others.” ⤴️

  • “individual acts of collection on the site contribute to a new kind of public construction of knowledge online.” ⤴️

  • “Pinterest’s notion of curation compares with traditional or already existing notions of professional curation and personal collection.” ⤴️

  • “users believe they are participating in personal acts of collection and reflexive identity building” ⤴️

  • “business “ecosystem” of the site, showing how these personal activities can also be understood as public acts of knowledge production.” ⤴️

  • “question notions of agency and power within the context of this public/private divide on Pinterest and what implications this might have for social media at large.” ⤴️

  • “Despite Pinterest’s emphasis on individual taste and customization, however, Cho’s page looks very similar to those of her followers. Oftentimes the boards of her followers have the same names and/or pinned objects, and consequently display the same aesthetic” ⤴️

  • “some sites focus on maintaining professional editors for a top-down approach to curation” ⤴️

  • “Pinterest promotes social curation” ⤴️

  • “Because much of the content on Pinterest is retail products, the site has generated interest among marketers and retailers.” ⤴️

  • “a focus on objects and personal collections above and beyond communication and connection” ⤴️

  • “personal acts of collection are subsumed by public acts of curation.” ⤴️

  • “This particular convergence of personal and public on Pinterest becomes clear in light of past or offline traditions of curation within environments such as museums or libraries.” ⤴️

  • “compared online curation with the activity of curating exhibits or managing collections of objects” ⤴️

  • “Pinterest also draws from these past practices of curation, but tends to privilege the notion of personal collecting as its main focus” ⤴️

  • “founder Ben Silbermann compares the creation of boards on Pinterest with more “homegrown” practices of collecting beetles, stamps, or family pictures (Chafkin, 2012 ; Quigley, n.d. ).” ⤴️

  • “domestic practices of scrapbooks or family albums.” ⤴️

  • “on Pinterest, these two streams converge more seamlessly, thus blurring the line between personal and public.” ⤴️

  • “Etymologically, curation is related to the Latin “curatio,” which means “to manage, to administrate, to take care of."" [⤴️](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k1xfe4p0r8jerw0f4j382nkq

  • “professional curation is usually positioned as the acquisition and caretaking of artifacts, which includes knowledge of how to preserve old or fragile objects (O’Neill, 2012 , p. 9).” ⤴️

  • “management of collections at large and the organization of public exhibits. Curation therefore encompasses practices of sorting, classifying, and labeling for the purposes of organization and display.” ⤴️

  • “This practice of professional sorting and cataloging is explicitly meant for the larger community—curation for the public. Museum and library collections may be privately owned, but are a part of the general commons; they are resources for a collective.” ⤴️

  • “If knowledge is understood to be the resource that these institutions provide then, as Hooper-Greenhill ( 1992) contends, the role of the curator is to shape that knowledge for the general public, through the creation of accessible object categories” ⤴️

  • “collection for personal use.” - “Abt (2006) traces the lineage of museums back to the practice of maintaining a “cabinet of curiosities"" ⤴️

  • “arranged according to the personal interests or directives of its owner” ⤴️

  • “traces of the individual nature of collections still remain within the official spaces of museums through the continued existence of esoteric and specialized sub-collections” ⤴️

  • “separation between public curation and private collections is porous —standardized ways of classifying and ordering always derive from particular perspectives and are continually negotiated through the ongoing maintenance” (Hobbs, 2010) .” ⤴️

  • “personal notebooks as a form of private collection and recordkeeping” ⤴️

  • “Pinterest is itself often considered a “digital scrapbook” (Madrigal, 2014 ).” ⤴️

  • “Depending on what these books contained, they were either called commonplace books or scrapbooks. The former usually contained fragments of carefully selected texts (such as quotes, poems, or scientific tables), whereas the latter also contained material ephemera (such as locks of hair, pieces of ribbon or leftover ticket stubs).” ⤴️

  • “the practice of scrapbooking became most popular among the middle class in the mid-1800s, after the introduction of mass-market print materials that could be easily cut up and placed into these personal books (Ott et al., 2006)” ⤴️

  • “As detailed by Ott et al. ( 2006) , scrapbooks have historically been kept for a wide range of purposes, from the pedagogic (e.g. physicians’ handbooks) to the aesthetic (e.g. artists’ notebooks). There has also been much documentation for the use of scrapbooks for maintaining personal, family, or community records and histories.” ⤴️

  • “as detailed by Conn ( 2000) , American museum visitors of the 19th century were often expected to bring in personal notebooks in which they could record information or draw pictures of objects they had seen in the galleries.” ⤴️

  • “scrapbooking has generally been understood as a domestic practice, since it has been “linked to traditional female concerns of holding families together and preserving nostalgic items” (p. 10).” ⤴️

  • “understood as a political practice: Greer (2003 )” ⤴️

  • “friendship albums (or collective scrapbooks) actually provided American girls of the 1800s and early 1900s avenues otherwise not afforded to them—to archive and legitimize their personal narratives.” ⤴️

  • “what occurs on Pinterest cannot solely be categorized as either public curation or private collection. Instead, the practices on the site reside in between these two realms: users are prompted to create boards for personal use, but it is understood that the objects of these collections become available for general use” ⤴️ - It is not ‘understood’ - many users believe it is private as shown in other texts

  • “much early enthusiasm for social media was based on an idea of connectedness, or the particular idea that people could use the internet in order to connect to other individuals” ⤴️

  • “early YouTube tagline—focused on the idea of “broadcasting” one’s self” ⤴️

  • “scholarly discussions around the private and the public online mostly revolved around users’ conscious decisions to demarcate between the two realms” ⤴️

  • “Marwick and boyd’s ( 2011) description of how Twitter users manage their tweets with respect to their imagined audience.” ⤴️

  • “Public attention shifted away from the broadcasting aspects of social media toward privacy concerns, however, once it became known that companies such as Facebook and Google heavily participated in the practice of data mining.” ⤴️

  • “Several scholars now highlight the need to pay attention to the networked conditions of user participations (Langlois, 2012) , as well as the ways that mined information are economized by corporations (Goldberg, 2010 ; Andrejevic, 2011) .” ⤴️

  • “What users do and what corporations intend are mutually constitutive of online activity (Van Dijck, 2013) .” ⤴️

  • “Whereas actornetwork theory (which focuses on “the coevolving networks of people and technologies”) and political economy (which “accentuates the economic infrastructure and legal-political governance as conditions for networks to evolve”) are often considered opposing approaches in the analysis of digital media, Van Dijck brings these together in her analytic framework of platforms as microsystems (pp. 26–28). On the one hand, she considers digital systems as techno-cultural constructs, something that can be seen by analyzing the technology, users and uses, and content of the platform. On the other hand, she also considers how the same systems may be understood as socio-economic structures, which can be seen through an analysis of the platform’s ownership, governance, and business model.” ⤴️

  • “I do consider the intersection of the six factors defined by Van Dijck (2013 )—technology, users and uses, content, ownership, governance, and business models” ⤴️

  • “and my own use of Pinterest over a 15-month research period as an analytical starting points.” ⤴️

  • “the boundary between public and private becomes more porous in the age of digital, networked media (Thompson, 2005 )” ⤴️

  • “the distinction between curation and collection likewise becomes blurred through the structure of Pinterest.” pp. 133⤴️

  • “visibility and accessibility of an individual’s pinning activity for others.” ⤴️

  • “Pinterest is explicitly framed for users as tool for personal, rather than social or communicative, use.” ⤴️

  • ""Pinterest is a tool for collecting and organizing things you love” and for pursuing personal “inspiration” (“About,” 2013 ).” ⤴️

  • “the company highlights the importance of “be[ing] yourself” and being “authentic—expressing who you really are and what you really like” (“Basics,” 2013)” ⤴️

  • “for improving one’s “life and work” (“About,” 2013 ), for tasks including making a “wishlist” or planning personal projects” ⤴️

  • “Boards on Pinterest may also be more cryptically labeled; while pinners are able to provide textual explanations for these boards, they may also leave collections unexplained (e.g. Oh Joy’s boards “Project 3,” “Project RC1”), and therefore illegible to others.” ⤴️

  • “While users can pin original content that they have found elsewhere on the internet, 80% of pins on Pinterest are actually objects that are “re-pinned” from the already existing database of images on Pinterest (Gilbreath, 2013 ).” ⤴️

  • “Much of this activity is prompted by the navigational technology of the site. Rather than utilizing the “rigid organizational structure” of the web such as “directories, time stamps, pagination,” Pinterest presents its users with a highly designed, constantly replenished “grid of images” (Chafkin, 2012, p. 96).” ⤴️

  • “suggested images, rather than a textual list of categories. While there is an option of using text search, this feature remains far less prominent than the images;” ⤴️

  • “Because of this navigation structure, the way that one moves through the site is therefore highly individualized; not only does each pinner encounter different home pages based on their previous pins, there is an infinite number of pathways that one can take once one enters the site, depending on one’s personal interests.” ⤴️

    • And the new ‘recently viewed pins feature in the bottom left hand corner is akin to the peripheral notes vision or context dependent screenshots or pathways

  • “the technology of Pinterest actively promotes “discovery-based” rather than textbased search navigation, a mode which relies more on in-the-moment affect and emotion, rather than goal-oriented searching (Chafkin, 2012; Madrigal, 2014 ).” ⤴️

  • “users can easily get caught following an unending chain of images that are driven by one’s personal aesthetic” ⤴️

    • this is why saving threads of interest with contextual journeys (eg tabs) is a common interaction format, it’s the only way to actually leave something behind and get back as much context as possible later

  • “the creation of boards on Pinterest involves several steps, which include: naming the boards, providing a text description (if desired), and classifying the board under the existing 24 themes” ⤴️ - “May 2013, Pinterest offered suggested titles for newly created boards” ⤴️ - “While Pinterest has stopped this practice, there are still millions of boards (and related collections) with those previously suggested titles” ⤴️

  • “Because of this programmed ‘flow,’ one’s discovery is therefore unlikely to deviate into vastly different categories.” ⤴️

  • “more difficult to maintain navigational searches that conform to alternate categorizations—such as personal chronology or non-object based classifications” ⤴️

  • “By providing suggestions for related categories and tags during searching (e.g. “fedora” or “church lady,” while one is searching under “hats”), the site “helps you find things you didn’t know that you were looking for” (Madrigal, 2014, para. 9)” ⤴️

  • “the initial collection of images brought into database was closely managed by the site’s founders.” ⤴️

  • “the site initially limited uploading of pictures directly from Facebook. They additionally instituted an inviteonly policy early in the site’s development—early Pinterest users included a group of design bloggers, whom founder Silbermann had recruited personally. These users, in turn, were asked to invite others whose aesthetic they respected;” ⤴️

  • “This policing of images was further pushed by their communication material; a former welcome email for the website asked users to “pin carefully” since “pins set the tone for the community” (Chafkin, 2012 , p. 146).” ⤴️

  • “Pinterest continues to control the flow of images on the site through both their “Acceptable Use” terms” ⤴️

  • this is why we need federated storage - conform to the pod provider whose policies you agree with

  • “the first listed restriction in this policy is a ban on content that is “is sexually explicit or pornographic”.” ⤴️

  • “the site has instituted a ban on the creation of “thinspiration” boards, which contain images of extremely thin women for the promotion of proanorexia messages (Murray, 2012) .” ⤴️

  • I do not know how to fix problems like this but it’s likely a collective bottom up solution more than a top-down banning??

  • “Pinterest actively works against subversive or “inappropriate” categories of classification.” ⤴️

  • which is very dangerous with only one small group deciding what is ‘too subversive’!!

  • “Through their “Pinterest for Business” program, companies can set up shortcut “Pin It” buttons on their own sites” ⤴️

  • “As a result, many of the pins on the site are directly posted from retail sites.” ⤴️

  • “embedded purchase and price information” ⤴️

  • “Within museums and libraries, the labeling and classification of objects produce certain frameworks for interpretation, which many people take as “expert” or authoritative (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992) .” ⤴️

  • “groupings all contain inherent judgments about worth—what should be preserved and highlighted” ⤴️

  • “choices on how to organize, and thus display, objects support particular frameworks for knowing and hide others; in this way, curatorial acts enact power (Foucault, 1970/1994 ).” ⤴️

  • “used as the base material through which users define one’s own taste and interests.” ⤴️

  • “activity on Pinterest can be compared with the traditional practices of scrapbooking, which allows for the tangible enactment of these highly personalized practices of juxtaposition and montage for the purposes of self-expression. Ott et al. ( 2006) describe the ways in which paper-based scrapbooks created opportunities for assemblage of the disparate objects, “often discovered by chance and reconstituted to create an entirely new context and meaning” (p. 17).” ⤴️

  • “scrapbooks were thought of as a “mass-cultural form, … individually each is unique, authentic, and not easily reproducible” (Ott et al., 2006 , p.12).” ⤴️

  • “scrapbooking activities can also reflect subjectivity or experience of a person itself (Hobbs, 2010” ⤴️

  • “Personalized organizational schemes that do not fit into standardized practices” ⤴️

  • “documentation or archival behavior may not only be representative, but also constitutive of experience itself (Hobbs, 2010, p. 226).” ⤴️

  • “shaping the self through surrounding objects, narratives, and activities (Giddens, 1991)” ⤴️

  • “Private acts of collecting things are simultaneously public acts of display.” ⤴️

  • “Pinterest is a tool for discovering what one likes.” ⤴️

  • “asserting one’s taste or style on the site becomes less a product of purchase intent, and more of future aspiration.” ⤴️

  • “drive “who I want to be” in the future (Chafkin, 2012 , p. 93).” ⤴️

  • “multiple top-down forces—whether the company itself or commercial members—that work to manage individual acts of pinning through both technological means (e.g. “Pin It” buttons, discovery-based “grid of image” navigation) and commercial means (e.g. partnerships with top pinners, management of retail boards).” ⤴️

  • “Pinterest is not dissimilar to the previous practices of selling pre-printed blank scrapbooks of the 19th century. Because these books were sold complete with suggested headings and illustrations, the form of these books threatened to challenge the previously unhindered ways of creating personalized notebooks (Garvey, 2012 ).” ⤴️

  • “because the site emphasizes the visual appeal over other considerations, it works to increase people’s craving for “fantasy” lifestyles and products that may not actually fit their incomes or actual lives.” ⤴️

  • “a “widening gap” between expectation and reality (Velasco, 2013, para. 3).” ⤴️

  • “As described by Chen ( 2012) , Pinterest is unique because offers “a gated community of perfectly curated boards,” which is “sheltered from the blasted racist hellscape of the rest of the web” (para. 2).” ⤴️ - wait how is Pinterest Not racist what do you MEAN

  • “Links to Facebook and Twitter on Pinterest make it obvious that the site engages in the practice of data mining. Retailers and ad networks are able to learn about individual pinners through their pinning and browsing activity, and can consequently work to profile large groups of people based on their collective preferences.” ⤴️

  • “a favorite of mothers and homemakers (Aslam, 2014 ), and the ideal place for marketers to reach an audience of “high-income, female[s]” (Smith, 2014 ).” ⤴️