I can spend hours poking around Pinterest; who can’t? And whenever I Google just about anything, images or pages from Pinterest will appear on the first page, and, oh dear! That’s me gone for ages, browsing around other people’s collections of images of things they like & admire, maybe adding a few to my own, wishing I had good taste & a sense of style like everyone else on there seems to, and just a little more money so I could buy all the things I love… HANG ON A MINUTE! I smell a rat…
Something tells me that it’s no coincidence that for days afterwards, little ads will pop up on other pages that I visit, showing things just like the ones I looked at. The same thing happens with things I look at on elsewhere too, which sometimes leads to hilarious results, particularly when I misspell something. And sometimes it’s quite informative as to what other people have been browsing on the family computer. But I’m pretty immune to pop-up adverts and sites very obviously trying to sell me stuff; it’s so unsubtle it’s a complete turn-off, like a desperate double-glazing or energy salesman, and makes me want to run away from whatever they’re offering.
Yet nothing can make me feel quite so quietly inadequate as Pinterest, and in my book that makes it rather dangerous; surely everyone creative uses it, it’s just like an ideas/story board, just an electronic pinboard of good ideas, excellent design, all the things I’d like to aspire to – and quite a lot of things I didn’t even know I desired until I saw them…?
Surely just a few pounds spent on nice things here & there wouldn’t hurt? And isn’t it a good way of keeping track of trends? Hmmmm – it might even be quite a good way of creating trends too. And if I’ve thought of that, you can bet the people who own & run it have, too. I have a suspicion that they might just be paying for all that server space & web traffic for their own benefit, rather than mine. But at the end of the day, it’s just a tool; I can use it for my own benefit, or I can let it use me. And if you think about it, and realise that it’s not there for our benefit, but for the benefit of the people who created it, own it & use it to market things to us – jolly clever they are, too! – then there’s no problem, is there? I’m sure everyone else has thought of that, too…
A recycled lifestyle... 